USA Independence Day Special: American Beauty

My new-found land: Discover Manhattan's hidden bars and New Englands shopping secrets. Daring to explore Los Angleses on foot and visiting a shrine to the Deep South's great romantic heronine.

By Jeremy Atiyah

Published: 30 June 2002

When it comes to San Francisco, Americans are unanimous. It is urbanity itself. It is handsome, worldly, cosmopolitan, cool and sophisticated. With those precipitous streets and terraced houses, those trams, bridges and ocean views, it effortlessly transcends all other world cities. The residents of San Francisco, according to this important sub-clause in the American dream, are uniquely fortunate, liberal and civilised human beings, enjoying the best music, art, food, wine (and real estate prices) on the planet.

A miracle? It seems like it, when you consider that most of San Francisco was built in a scrambling hurry, by people who had just arrived from the Wild West. I'm here on a fresh sunny day, in shirtsleeves, eating elegantly on a pavement, being served by a waitress who probably has a PhD from Berkeley. The notion that this lightly grilled tuna and that glass of chardonnay owe anything to the gun-toting, railway-building, Indian-killing, racoon-hat-wearing men of the prairies is clearly an absurdity. This city must have other origins. No citizen of Europe need find these hard to discern.

There is no mystery about this. After all, Europeans colonised this coast before the Americans did. Nor did it happen very long ago. As recently as 6 November 1769, in fact, did Gaspar de Portola of Spain find himself looking down from a neighbouring hilltop on to a bay the size of an inland sea. "We halted," he later recalled, of that blessed discovery, "in a level place, thickly grown with oak trees, having many lagoons and swamps."

He and his men spent the subsequent night encamped, surrounded by reeds, brambles and roses. And the next day in the morning they were sensible enough to annex this goodly harbour for Spain. They did so by erecting a cross on the southern side of its entrance – an entrance that would later become known as the Golden Gate. Which is where I am now, on a warm afternoon, looking at clipped lawns and trees and American flags and redbrick houses. Before being designated as parkland in 1994, this area was one of the most scenic army stations in the United States, but San Franciscans have only ever called it the Presidio.

Because here it is, right beneath these manicured lawns and pavements and shiny cars: the foundations of the Presidio itself, that is to say, of Spain's northernmost garrison in the New World. In 1993, archaeologists unearthed the remains of 5ft-thick adobe walls. I call it the proof, if any were needed, that San Francisco does have a history pre-dating Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead. The British too were here. Their first ship to enter San Francisco – under George Vancouver – arrived in the autumn of 1792. After waking up on his first morning to catch a pleasingly English glimpse of cattle and sheep grazing, Vancouver himself opined that this was "as fine a port as the world affords".

Not that the Spanish Presidio amounted to much back then. "What was pompously called by this name, had but a mean appearance," scoffed Vancouver's botanist, later. And Vancouver himself admitted that he had been expecting an actual city, before instead being shown "a square area, 200 yards in length, enclosed by a mud wall and resembling a pound for cattle".

In fact the original Spanish Presidio contained a church, royal offices, warehouses, a guardhouse and houses for soldiers and settlers. But the buildings and furniture, being "of the rudest fashion and of the meanest kind", hardly accorded with the ideas conceived by thrusting British explorers, "of the sumptuous manner in which the Spaniards live on this side of the globe". And it was laughably ill-defended. In short, summarised Vancouver, "instead of finding a country tolerably well inhabited and far advanced in cultivation ... there is not an object to indicate the most remote connection with any civilised nation". I just wish he had known what history had in store. What place has changed so much, so quickly, as California in the past 200 years?

In Vancouver's day, even places such as the pueblo of San Jose, on the southern fringe of San Francisco Bay, or Los Angeles further down towards Mexico, contained only 100 or 200 people, and otherwise comprised fruit trees, vines and gardens. George Vancouver had little clue that this coast would soon become the economic and cultural juggernaut of the world, home to beatniks, hippies, gays and dotcom millionaires. From where I am standing, I see the massive red supports of the Golden Gate Bridge; joggers in designer apparel padding the shoreline; vast highways funnelling distant traffic; aeroplanes cruising the skies; the Transamerica Pyramid twinkling from downtown. Everything around me has been imported, assembled, collected and constructed –in almost no time at all. Not even the natural environment seems to have been exempt from this process. Now it is wooded, but none of these grand old eucalyptus, cypress or pine trees turns out to be indigenous. When the Spanish arrived 200 years ago they found the shore overlaid by sand dunes, with grass and a few oak trees dotting the edges. Marshes along the shore attracted seagulls and pelicans, a few deer and the odd mountain lion or grizzly bear. Visitors described the land south of the Golden Gate as windswept and barren. Could a visitor from the 1790s, I ask myself, recognise anything of the modern city at all?

As if in answer, a bank of ocean cloud suddenly blots out the sunshine. Perhaps this is the one point of continuity. The notoriously clammy and bone-chilling coastal fog of the San Franciscan summer.
It was certainly the fog that drove most of the Spanish settlers inland. I already know where they ended up: not here by the Presidio, but a couple of miles away, across the peninsula, where the weather was better, at the Mission Dolores. And this is where I am going now.

The mission, alongside the Presidio, represented the other essential pillar of the Spanish occupation of California. Its function was to house monks, whose task was to convert native Americans up and down this coast. I am delighted to note that the relevant district of San Francisco still goes by the name of Mission. I'll get there from the Presidio by bus. Two centuries ago, travellers covered the same ground on horseback.

The journey, either way, takes around an hour, though for Vancouver the ride "was rendered unpleasant, by the soil being very loose and sandy, and by the road being much incommoded with low grovelling bushes". According to a Russian visitor, "Above half the road was sandy and mountainous. Only a few small shrubs here and there diversified the barren hills." Those barren hills, of course, now go by such names as Pacific Heights, Nob Hill and the Haight, and are best crossed by cable car.
Meanwhile, I'm reaching the Mission Dolores. Stepping inside the chapel I confess to intense feelings of disorientation. Is this the same land that has given the world Hollywood and the silicon chip? It turns out, in fact, that the Spanish missionaries had an excellent sense of timing: they reached this spot in the week in which American Independence was being declared on the other side of the continent. Today, the thick, whitewashed walls and heavy roof tiles of San Francisco's first building still present a startling image of an alternative America. Its cool floor tiles, saints, candles and Mexican altars astonish me as they astonished George Vancouver 210 years ago. He was dumbfounded by "its magnitude, architecture and internal decorations"; I'm dumbfounded that it exists at all.

And there's more. Later, from 18th-century drawings inside the mission buildings, I will see how this chapel once overlooked meandering streams, hills, Indian reed huts, and a scattering of animals at pasture. I look again, and gulp. Right outside this building, at pavement tables, people are consuming cranberry juice and bagels with smoked salmon for breakfast. Here in the gloom I am peering at sketches of Indians emerging from the reeds, handing gifts of fish and acorns to priests, with a hazy sun rising from behind the Oakland hills.

Whose vision of paradise is this? Not Vancouver's. In his mean-spirited view, the natives here were "a race of the most miserable beings possessing the faculty of human reason, I ever saw". They were "ill-made" and their "ugly" faces presented a "dull, heavy and stupid countenance". Their houses were "abominably infested with every kind of filth and nastiness".

But by most other accounts the Spanish monks and Indian hunter-gatherers of San Francisco lived agreeably together, off Mexican corn and chillis and native acorns and fish. A German naturalist who visited in 1806 was amazed to note that the Indian converts "three times a day ... get a measure of soup of meat, pulse and vegetables, about three English pints in size". And he himself did even better, stuffing himself on a "dinner of soup, roasted fowls, leg of mutton, vegetables salad, pastry, preserved fruit". The wine and tea – regrettably – were only of middling quality, but that was compensated for "by super-excellent chocolate".

Such were the charms of Spanish California. Don't expect any drama to this story, though: we know how it ended. After its first 100 years, the Mission Dolores was already ruinous and crumbling, overgrown with fig trees and wild flowers. Today, I find its cemetery in a ramshackle state, with roses and lupins sprouting in the long grass, amid stones marking the graves of Italian, Irish and English, as well as Spanish, Catholics. I pause at the forgotten obelisk of Don Luis Antonio Arguello, "the first governor of Mexican California", then step outside to find a bearded dropout with a supermarket trolley, flogging a spare tyre, a pot plant and a pile of pamphlets. "And," he exclaims to me, lifting out a polystyrene box, "the most beautiful mould of Jesus I've ever seen. Wanna look?"

No thanks, I tell him, speeding up to overtake. Yes, the enterprising Americans got here eventually. It was they who built this impossibly picturesque city, after all, competing to set up farms, chop down trees, build sawmills, open workshops and pan for gold – but without ever quite forgetting the spirit of the place.

Or so it seems to me. And with this in mind, I decide to stop at one of those pavement cafés to order a dish of angel-hair pasta with sun-dried tomatoes and fresh basil. Over dinner, at sunset by the old Spanish Mission, I will take time to reflect a little more on the origins of the world's most wonderful city.


The Facts


Getting there
Jeremy Atiyah flew courtesy of American Airlines (0845 606 0461; www.aa.com). Return fares in July from Heathrow via JFK in New York cost £565 including tax. The fare drops to £498.20 in September. Cheaper fares may be available through discount agents such as Quest Worldwide (020-8546 6000).


Being there
Jeremy Atiyah stayed at the Four Seasons Hotel on Market Street near Union Square. Double rooms at the hotel cost from $469 (£321) per room per night.
A special introductory rate of $369 is available from now until 31 December, subject to availability (00800 6488 6488; www.fourseasons.com).

A cheaper alternative could be the atmospheric Archbishop's Mansion (001 415 563 7872; www.thearchbishopsmansion.com) which overlooks the historic Alamo Square, home to San Francisco's famous "painted ladies", terraces of brightly decorated Victorian houses. Double rooms start from $195. Visit www.visitcalifornia.com for more information.

Hotel Kamp, Helsinki

By Jeremy Atiyah

Published: 19 June 2002

The historic Hotel Kamp in central Helsinki, all sweeping staircases, ballrooms and heated ceramic divans, has, since its renovation in 1999, resumed its role as a solid bastion of European snobbery: a role for which it was designed in the days when the Russian Czars ruled Finland.
Having fallen into a decline after the war, the hotel was demolished in the 1960s and rebuilt as a bank. It was reopened as a hotel in 1999, refurbished to resemble the original in every possible detail.


Location, location, location
Hotel Kamp, Helsinki Pohjoisesplanadi 29, 00100 Helsinki, Finland (00 358 9 576111, www.hotelkamp.fi). Bang in the middle of the city, just off the gardens of Esplanade Park.
Transport: Nothing is very far away in a small city. The train station and the port are within a few minutes' walk. Senate Square is just round the corner.


Time to international airport: A taxi to Helsinki's efficient airport, 19km north of town, will take around 20 minutes and cost about €25/£16.


Are you lying comfortably?
Rooms are large and opulent. Finland is cold for much of the year, so the emphasis is on heavy draperies. Every conceivable extra has been thought of, from mains electricity sockets that accept both US and UK plugs to umbrellas that you can borrow on rainy days. The bathrooms even have heated mirrors. Suites, all individually designed, culminate in the 258 sq m Mannerheim which has a library, sauna, antiques, and dining table for 14.


The bottom line
Standard doubles range from €330 (£210). Better deals can be obtained through a UK short-break specialist such as Inntravel (01653 629010), which offers two nights' B&B from £284 per person, including return scheduled flights.


I'm not paying that: Puhkus, on Vilhonkatu 6B (00 358 9 627437), offers the cheapest centrally located beds in Helsinki: quads without bathroom for €70 (£45) per room, triples from €63 (£40) and doubles from €56 (£36) with shower.

Hotel Ritz, Barcelona

By Jeremy Atiyah

Published: 22 May 2002

From the day it opened in 1919, the Hotel Ritz was by far Barcelona's smartest, and most expensive, choice; the kings of Spain and Italy, and the president of the French Republic, all stayed here during the early years.

The very name, the Ritz, conjures up up-market aspirations. From the day it opened in 1919, the Hotel Ritz was by far Barcelona's smartest, and most expensive, choice; the kings of Spain and Italy, and the president of the French Republic, all stayed here during the early years.

Not that it's been all plain sailing. A few days after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, the Ritz was taken over by the trade unions and turned into the "Gastronomic Hotel No.1". A picture of Lenin was hung in the hall and "collective dining rooms" were established. A few years later, guests included the likes of Heinrich Himmler and Marshal Pétain. However, after the Second World War, it was back to business as usual with a return of the princes, grand duchesses, kings, archdukes and princesses, who chose the Ritz for their balls and grand receptions. The least conventional visitor to date has been Salvador Dali, who ordered a horse to be brought up to his suite, either stuffed or dissected, according to which story you believe.


Location, location, location

The Hotel Ritz is at Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes 668 08010, Barcelona (00 34 93 318 5200, www.ritzbcn.com).

The Ritz is on the wide and leafy Gran Via, just off the Passeig de Gracia, about 10 minutes' walk from the central Plaza de Catalunya.


Time to international airport: It's a half-hour taxi ride and costs €25-€30 (£16-£19).


Are you lying comfortably?
Expense and exclusiveness are the hallmarks of this hotel, rather than attention to detail. The doors don't quite fit perfectly and some of the fittings look as though they haven't been changed in 80 years. Yet, this is all part of the charm. When you see the pink marble floors of the eccentrically shaped bathroom you won't care if the showerhead is slightly wonky.


Keeping in touch: the telephone cable can connect to your computer, but may not be able to transmit a message. The Ritz was not built for the internet.


The bottom line
Doubles start from €385.85 (£243.50). If you book in the UK through The Leading Hotels of the World (00 800 2888 8882, www.lhw.com) you might get a better rate.


I'm not paying that: the Ramblas Hotel, La Rambla 33 (00 34 93 301 57 00), has doubles from €154.08 (£97.25).

For Pete's sake

St Petersburg was supposed to be the greatest city in the world. So why did Peter the Great build it in a remote swamp on the edge of Finland?

By Jeremy Atiyah

Published: 21 April 2002

It is the work of a madman," says Timofei, flinging a wild arm at his city. We're standing in the gloom and the cold beside Russia's most famous statue. My shoes are wet. And here is the culprit: Peter the Great, he of the intercontinental vision, astride a colossal horse, rearing and ready to charge.
Timofei, my guide, just can't help spewing out emotional jokes and erudite references. And pointing darkly at the statue, he now assures me that nobody of taste likes this 18th-century premonition of Stalin. "Your two front hooves," he mutters, "have leaped far off into the darkness..."

He is quoting some poet, as usual. I can't match that, though I do recall Catherine's favourite philosopher, Denis Diderot, calling this "a city of quite a new kind, a great and amazing city". Yes. Peter's city was to be the greatest city in the world. It was to be a city of the future, modern, commercial, multicultural, free from the past, free from darkness – perhaps even free from Russia. Mud would be turned to marble, huts to palaces, beards to brains. And how has it turned out?

For some reason, this strikes Timofei as a hilarious question. Just 10 minutes ago he was skidding me through the Palace Square, all overspread with ugly black tarmac as if for a film shoot; a rerun, say, of the Bolsheviks' assault on the Winter Palace. And then there was the palace itself: enclosing its Karelian-birch furniture, its walls of crimson damask, its colonnades, its onyx columns and agate inlays and rosewood window shutters.

"But can you imagine how it is, living with that in the centre of your city?" Timofei keeps asking, in incredulity. "Requiring your subjection, for ever and ever?" Unshaven, scarf-wrapped and sniffing, he looks more eccentric by the minute. Into the 20th century – he now exclaims – that fabled building remained home to an absolute monarch! A Caesar, a Sun King, claiming divine right to rule Russia!
So catastrophe was imminent. Even I can see that, without Timofei labouring the point. In 1918, with cigarette butts and dirty mattresses now littering its Winter Palace, this city rudely ceased to be capital of Russia. Within two years, its population had plummeted by two thirds. In the 1930s a quarter of its surviving population was purged. And within a decade of that, amid mass starvation, the entire city – now known as Leningrad – would stand on the brink of physical annihilation.

"Maybe, things ... have got a little better since then?" I murmur. Just an hour ago, after all, I was sitting in the restored Astoria Hotel, drinking tea and listening to a piano tinkle. Nicholas I's statue still prances outside the hotel, and Europe's rich seems able once again, in St Petersburg, to enjoy the exclusive opulence of liveried servants, a ballroom and a winter garden.

But Timofei does not want to hear this. He wants to talk about the fact that it's been sleeting and snowing ever since I arrived, and that Nevsky Prospekt and Decembrists' Square are full of darkly clad people shuffling through inches of mud and slush. And it's all Peter's fault. Why in God's name couldn't he have foreseen this in 1703, when he built his city on the edge of nowhere, in a swampy fetid corner of Finland, on Russia's remotest edge? Beneath these palaces and pavements, St Petersburg is half-sea, half-marsh. "Sprung out of the mire of dark and wood," marvelled Pushkin. Right now, with dripping icicles threatening me from every overhang, I admit it seems a wet place for a city.

Or perhaps it was just a joke. Peter's kind of joke: to watch gentlemen in brocaded coats, from the court and the diplomatic corps, forced to leave Moscow and set up home in a watery wilderness. Wasn't it hilarious? Timofei looks almost ready to cry as he recalls Peter's cruelties. This was the Tsar who purposely invited more guests to his dinner parties than could find seats. The result was "such scuffling and fighting for chairs that nothing more scandalous can be seen in any country". When the dust had settled, carpenters and shipwrights were in the best seats next to the Tsar, while "senators, ministers, generals, priests, sailors, buffoons of all kinds, sit pell-mell without distinction".

Might St Petersburg have been conceived as one of these jokes? A ghastly experiment in human souls? Timofei just won't stop. He is now almost on a gallop, gesturing at palaces, gabbling out reasons for hating the greatest tsar. Forty thousand labourers per year were to be sent here from the provinces to build, build, build! Tens of thousands died! "And this heretic," he pants, "is the founder of our modern state!"

From the start, then, it was clear that only evil could ever befall this newfangled city on the Gulf of Finland, with its Germanic-sounding name, disastrously founded on blasphemy and impiety. So said old men then, in (illegal) long beards, and so says Timofei now. But while Timofei is pointing out storm-stained, mustard-coloured palaces, with heavy doors, begrimed interiors and colossal renovation costs, my mind is floating back to Pushkin, and thinking of old St Petersburg, with its soft northern light and its bridges and spires, its noblemen on horseback, its sail ships filling the Neva skyline, its phosphorescent summer nights, its women in silk stockings and beauty spots, its gilded carriages and sledges, its whirling couples behind windows, its galloping troikas, its duels at daybreak. I demand a brief pause in the tour.

Since Pushkin's day, I now declare, central St Petersburg – as a monument in stone and stucco – has hardly changed. "It has! It is 200 years worse!" retorts Timofei at once, implacable, leaning by the embankment of the Moika Canal. The white ice on the canal is littered with vodka bottles. On muddy verges, a whole winter's worth of dog excrement is surfacing with the thaw. On street level I see grimy cars, grimy buildings, grimy windows; up above, tangled cables for trams and trolley buses criss-cross the sky. Where is the answer? Was this city really condemned to misery from the day it was built?

Timofei is keen for me to understand that it was. And under black skies, we now hurry on foot to the place where it all began 299 years ago: the St Peter and Paul fortress on its own island in the Neva. Crossing a footbridge over the ice, we enter a cathedral full of marble slabs.

"Meet the family," Timofei is saying. He means it. Because here they are, the Romanov Tsars, all under one roof, in the candlelight. To describe this lot as dysfunctional would do them no justice at all. Peter killed his son, Catherine her husband, and Alexander I his father. Which prompts me to wonder aloud if St Petersburgers are now glad to have their last tsar back here, rescued from his Communist hell in 1998. But Timofei, unblinking, is staring at these plain slabs of marble. "St Petersburgers are these people," he says. When I remind him that Nicholas II died 80 years ago, he dismisses this. "No, no, it has never stopped for us. We are citizens of St Petersburg."

This is an unusual situation. My guide seems to be on the point of losing his mind, as a result of his work. I escort him outside. Is he OK? Does he need to rest? "No, no," he says, standing in puddles, wiping his nose. "But let's get out of here." We hurry over bridges through slush-splattered traffic, in search of something less depressing. And half an hour later we are on the snowy parade ground of the Field of Mars, surrounded by bile-coloured barracks and palaces. Packs of children are warming themselves beside an eternal flame. But here it was, 200 years ago, that Catherine's son Paul tried to regulate Russian chaos by introducing Prussian-style square-bashing. "It was just like Peter shaving off holy Russian beards," scoffs Timofei.

Somehow we are being drawn inexorably to another St Petersburg: the cold city of the 19th-century autocracy, of Nicholas I, the immobile, neoclassical, haughty Nicholas; the city of yellow stucco and white columns, where even the office workers wore uniform, the nightmare city of Gogol and Dostoyevsky, where one button undone could mean degrading to the ranks, a flogging, or exile to Siberia.

Depression begins to weigh me down. But on the subject of alienation and disaffection, Timofei seems to cheer up. A while later, he is leading me to Sennaya Ploshchad, the old hay market, the setting for Crime and Punishment. He starts reminding me of Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov stumbling about this square, a place of "revolting misery" and "insufferable stenches" and "drunken men whom he met continually, although it was a working day". And before I know it, he's on to Gogol, with his "soulless heap of houses tumbled one upon the other, roaring streets, seething mercantilism, that ugly pile of fashions, parades, clerks, wild northern nights, specious glitter and base colourlessness". And it's true: things are just as cheerlessly static here as in any other part of St Petersburg. The square looks like an 1880s slum. Shifty men in bad suits and caps are standing about amid piles of slush and excrement, while women walk defensively arm in arm. For a moment, dare I say it, Timofei almost looks at home.
In the heat of his optimism, in fact, he even suggests taking a bus out of town – which is all very well for the first 20 miles, enclosed behind steamed-up windows, until the unmistakable shadow of another baroque palace falls upon our bus. This is Tsarskoye Selo: good for me, bad for Timofei. As we step into the snow, the façade of the Catherine Palace seems to go on for ever, shining now gold, now blue, windows rising upon windows, statues upon statues, columns upon columns, in a relentless receding line. "You see," says Timofei, "after Peter's death, the city began to acquire this fake, southern, Italian magnificence."

It was the Empress Elizabeth who first asked Bartolomeo Rastrelli to amend Peter's palaces; Catherine the Great then made further improvements to impress foreigners. "Well I'm a foreigner and I am impressed," I say, hoping to boost my guide's morale. And I mean it. Stepping inside, we find Rastrelli's monumental ballroom, crawling from ceiling to floor with gold leaf, on the mirror frames, the cornices, the candelabra, the lintels. We stroll through rooms that go on for ever, like years. One room is cool and classical, the next a baroque inferno. Each is themed and fabulous, with chinoiserie, cherubs, garlands, silken wallpaper, onyx vases, agate wall panels, Ottoman divans, patterned parquet flooring, monumental tiled stoves, ceramic columns, lapis lazuli tabletops, giant picture portraits.
"Upstarts!" Timofei keeps bursting out in my ear. "Parvenus! Trying to out-Europe Europe!" I have just been imagining immense retinues of courtiers with diamond buckles and buttons and epaulets. Now I see my guide's pale face. Perhaps a little fresh air for him? And in blinding snow, we step out into the garden, with its lawns, gravel walks, woods and follies. Troops of huddled tourists shuffle about under snow-laden trees. Then, down the road, beyond frozen ponds and rickety bridges, we spy the unkempt and peeling columns of the Alexander Palace.

Timofei looks reluctant to enter another palace. But once inside, we notice that it has been decorated on a rather modest scale. It is almost human. Suddenly, we are faced with chintzy English wallpaper, electric light switches, telephones, toys, chests of drawers, snaps of the children in cheap frames crowding the mantelpiece; personal remnants of the last tsar and his family.

"The creeping embourgoisement of the later tsars" is how my snooty guidebook describes these scenes. But the photos are painful. There is the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, uptight, with a pulled-in waist and puffed out shoulders; there is Nicholas beside his identically bearded cousin, the future King George V of Great Britain. And, suddenly, we are in the age of a 20th-century royal family. Nicholas, slight and neat, sitting in a group shot with his handsome wife and the children. Maria, Olga, Tatiana, Anastasia and little Prince Alexei: all at ease, all shimmering in their privileged innocence; all facing imminent death.

I hear a gutter gurgling. In this dingy room, the long windowpanes seem to be walls of sleet. But Timofei is wrapping and unwrapping his scarf, in an uncharacteristic silence, out-stared by the royal ghosts. It's that family again. And like them, it seems, Peter's great hope for Russia – his great city of the future – has already been dead and gone, for many, many years.


The Facts


Getting there
Only British Airways (0845 77 333 77; www.ba.com) and Aeroflot (020-7355 2233; www.aeroflot.co.uk) fly direct from the UK (London) to St Petersburg. Return flights cost £315 with BA and £210 with Aeroflot.

Jeremy Atiyah stayed at the five-star Astoria Hotel, which can booked through The Leading Hotels of the World UK (00800 2888 8882; www.lhw.com). Doubles cost from £258 per night.

He also spent several nights staying in "home-stay" accommodation, booked through The Russia Experience (020-8566 8846; www.trans-siberian.co.ukwww.trans-siberian.co.uk), an excellent option for first-time visitors to Russia. Prices vary according to location, starting from around £170 per person, based on two sharing, for a minimum three-night stay, including transfers and half-board accommodation.

Interchange (020-8681 3612; email: interchange@interchange.uk.com), a specialist Russia operator, can put together packages. A three-night break costs £344 per person, based on two sharing, including return direct flights, transfers and b&b in a hotel.


Further information
All visitors to Russia require a visa. If booking a package through an operator leave visa formalities to them, otherwise contact the Russian Consulate, 5 Kensington Palace Gdns, London W8 4QX (020-7229 8027).

Barcelona loner

Fifteen years ago, Jeremy Atiyah came looking for an old-world Spanish experience. His neighbours craved a Spain that was 'super-moderno'. Today he admits, perhaps they had a point

Published: 07 April 2002

Mercedes may not have been my kind of girl, in the same sense that Barcelona may not have been my kind of town. "Super-moderno!" she would shriek, at 5am, at the sight of a chrome Cadillac affixed to a discotheque wall in the name of design. Yes, we were in the 1980s. But I had fled to Spain to live the life of a penniless Bohemian. Had I chosen the wrong city?

There were good reasons for Mercedes' addiction to modernity. The Catalans, after all, were still emerging from a fascist twilightland of sexual, linguistic and cultural repression. But then again, I too was emerging from something that seemed almost as bad – a privileged British education. Weren't we all on the rebound? And yet, while I had taken my typewriter to live in a pension in the Gothic quarter, trapped amid smells of frying chips, with cracked-tiled floors, a creaking bedstead and a front-door key as long as my forearm, Mercedes had got into glamorous hairstyles and designer jackets.


"You like that slum?" she used to ask me, with deep mistrust. I told her that I did. And down the road from the Pension Costa, what was more, at a café called the Casa Jose, where the floors were strewn with tissues and prawn shells, I ate daily lunches of chickpea soup followed by meat or fish a la plancha ("on the plate"). This honest fare, I told Mercedes, in triumph, was washed down with wine drunk from the spout of a carafe. Why pay for chrome Cadillacs in your disco when you could have a set menu with characterful old peasants for £1.50?


We really did not mesh. Mercedes showed me the Pedrera, Gaudi's (and her) idea of what a man's home should look like, rippling round a corner on the Passeig de Gracia like a cliff-faced eroded by centuries of dripping water. Its balcony-rails resembled pieces of burnt-out wreckage, or the dissolved residue of an acid attack.


"You see, we are modern people," Mercedes would exclaim, icily, pointing out half-seen towers swirling from the roof. "We are not peasants, as you English think. Am I right or am I wrong?"
I fear she was right. But I didn't want to be wrong. I wanted patatas bravas, funny old Spaniards, olive trees, ancient inscriptions, idle chat, haphazard service and sunshine; not stylish discotheques or designer bars or the Olympic games or modernism or Miró or Gaudi. Which was why, in 1988, I ran away from Barcelona, vowing never to return. Until now, that is. Because here I am again, essentially the same man, wondering what I left behind.


And all I can say so far, is that the hoopla surrounding the 1992 Olympic games has not yet gone away. Checking in at the new-fangled art hotel, on the restored seafront, I arrive to find thousands of Catalans massing here for a Sunday stroll through the Olympic Village. They are predictably proud of this hotel. It is Spain's tallest building. It has been built within a superstructure of naked girders. Inside, it is full of original art. But when I notice that my room costs £100, I yearn for the Pension Costa.


Meanwhile, the first bit of tourism I need to do, is to visit the Sagrada Familia. Catalans measure their lifetimes by the progress of the works on this place. Stepping out of the metro right now, I confess that I am thunderstruck. Beyond the piles of half-cut masonry, an interior to the nave has emerged, with delicate columns leaning like giant rhubarb stalks to a canopied roof. Now I can see how long I have been away.


I set off strolling, but at an anxious speed, through town. Idly walking is a civic duty here. Mercedes used to assure me that the Spanish derived their late-night energy from doing it with friends before dinner. "It is the best time of the day to socialise. You English go to your pubs after dinner. This is wrong. After dinner is a time for dancing, not for talking."


Yes, I think. Dancing. But now the original Ramblas seems to have lost something. I see foreign fast-food outlets everywhere. What I remember as a peep show is now a bank. The performance artists are still there amid the flower-vendors, but looking rather tired. And when I take a closer look at the Catalans, I see what I have always suspected: that they are old-fashioned at heart. In their eyes I see scant evidence of Miró or Gaudi; but plenty, of new apartments and Habitat furniture.
In the glorious Boqueria market, skinned goats' heads with bulging eyeballs are on sale. The salted bacalao looks as raw as the shores of Newfoundland. I remain as calm as a Spaniard while waiting 10 minutes for service behind a hatted lady who is remonstrating with a fruit-vendor. "Last week the oranges were dry," she is exclaiming, "the week before stupendous, the week before sour! Now I just don't know where I am!"


Even as she speaks, I am noticing that the Boqueria's piles of hand-selected fruit would not disgrace the Harrods' food hall. I see plums from Chile, apples from Japan, kiwi fruit from California. This worries me. What is more, all the housewives are totting up their sums in euros.


Walking down to the waterfront I keep catching views of a city that never used to exist. The Barceloneta district I remember as an isolated grid of alleyways and dodgy fish restaurants on the edge of town; now I see tour groups of schoolchildren, exclaiming over Catalan marvels of the 21st century.


Didn't this bit here used to be part of the sea? This bit where lawns and mature palm trees have been planted? Gaudi too seems to be here, in the dismembered handrails and erupting plazas. I step out onto floating bridges to arrive at a super-moderno shopping and cinema complex called Maremagnum which reminds me of Singapore airport.


It is all wonderful. I'm just annoyed that Mercedes has been proven right. And I promptly duck back into the Gothic quarter, in a desperate bid to find my own neighbourhood. But here, instead of quaint old grocers, I pass shops selling lava lamps, dyed fabrics and ethnic kitsch. Inca and Hindu goddesses have replaced chickpeas and lentils. The grocery stores that survive are now run by Pakistani families.


And where is the Casa Jose? Is this it? I am standing in front of a bar decorated with pretentious Art Deco calligraphy, glinting with bottles and seductive lighting. Credit cards are accepted. The set menu is an astronomical £6.


I am almost in a panic by the time I approach the building where I once spent a year of my life. I pass another furniture shop. Surely that never used to be there? Or might it be that I just didn't notice furniture shops in those days? As for the Pension Costa: I am convinced it no longer exists. Then on street level, right next to the Plaza St Jaime, a mere 100 yards from the Gothic cathedral, I notice a herborist which strikes me as new, until I recognise the smell, a mix of camphor and camomile, mingling with the alleyway aromas of frying oil and cats' piss.


This is it. The medieval doorway is open. It is a place Mercedes would never have gone. I creep up broken brick steps and ring on the bell. A clanking and jangling of keys announces the extremely slow approach of an owner who, when he finally gets the door open, seems not to have seen the light of day in decades.


"How much is a room?" I ask. Seven thousand a week, he tells me. He hasn't worked that out in euros yet. But I make it about £3 a night, a slight decrease, in sterling terms, since the 1980s. I check the room, which hasn't changed in 15 years, and realise, with worry, that neither have I. It still strikes me as a very interesting bargain.


"We just have retired people staying here," the old man mumbles. "The ones who can afford it. You want to book the room now?" I think about years long gone, and tell the man that I will let him know as soon as possible.

Mexico: Tequila sunrise begins in the heart of the blue agave

Fearsomely spiky plants, fiendishly fiery liquor: Jeremy Atiyah takes a side trip to Jalisco in search of Mexico's national spirit

Published: 11 February 2002

I am on my way to an important little town in the Mexican state of Jalisco. It's called Tequila. So important is it that one of Mexico's last surviving train services runs here, twice weekly, from Guadalajara. I have chosen to take a bus tour, though, joining an English couple, John and Liz from the West Midlands, and a Mexican family from Oaxaca. We're on the scent of a certain liquor, distilled from the fermented juice of the blue agave plant. Like the town, it is called tequila.

We're driving through a sunny landscape of orchards and forests that looks as fruitful as Tuscany. Trees groan under the weight of avocados, birds of prey float over the Sierra Madre Occidental and snakes (I am sure of it), rustle in the dry grass. We pass into a country devoted to alcohol. Pale blue lines criss-cross the rich, red earth. Jalisco's valleys could be outside St Emilion, except that we are not talking about Cabernet Sauvignon. These are blue agave plants, 100 million of them.

As is often the case in Mexico, Tequila is an oasis of dust surrounded by a sea of fertility. It announces itself with a petrol station and a pile of scrapped cars. But then it's on to the souvenirs, the cobbled streets and the picturesque men in big hats. "If we can't get it through duty-free, shall we drink it here?" says John, pointing at barrels stacked outside shops. "Ooh, yes!" giggles Liz.

The Aztecs had developed a taste for the blue agave's sweet sap long before the conquistadors got here, says our guide. They made sweets from it, for holy purposes, and travelled great distances to collect it. "They also," he says, looking disdainfully at the English tourists, "used its leaves to torture their enemies."

The agave is a wide family of often woody plants, distributed throughout tropical, subtropical, and temperate areas of the world. Most have nasty, lance-shaped, fleshy or toothed leaves sticking up from their bases. The Yucca is one of them, though the house plant's sap is not distilled into liquor. Tequila doesn't come from any old agave, only from the blue agave,Agave tequilana Weber. And by law, it can only be distilled from agave grown in Jalisco, and in bits of four other states. Every tequila must contain at least 51 per cent agave juice (the remainder can be molasses, caramel or yeast).
Sauza, the company providing all this tequilan information, troops us through a plantation of shady fruit trees before a grand ranch house. The sun shines on the bananas and lemons. Our guide, Jose, explains that one man can propagate between 800 and 1,200 baby agave plants per day. The babiesappear around the base of the parent plants; they have to be dug out and replanted in neat rows with plenty of space between.

Thus it is that plantations of blue agave, from a distance, are as pretty as vineyards. But close-up, the plant resembles an explosion of swords projecting from the dry earth. It is not the kind of thing you would wish to encounter if you were wandering lost, at night, in a swimming costume.

And harvesting it is not like plucking apples or grapes either. No matter how much devotion you have lavished on your agave plants, over the requisite eight to 10 years, when it comes to harvesting, the whole plant is annihilated.

Jose begins to dig up a whole agave plant from the sun-baked ground, looking as if he is saving us from a dangerous wild animal. Luckily he has some formidable spades and machetes at his disposal. Then he chops the leaves off the plant, while avoiding the twin hazards of impaling himself on the spines, or cutting his foot off with the machete. Jose offers us the machete to try and the Oaxacan patriarch takes over. "Ladies, stand back," he commands, hacking for dear life.

Once the leaves have been chopped off, the heart of the blue agave, the piña, remains – a football-sized object that resembles a cross between a pineapple and a hand grenade. I can lift one, just. On average, I am told, three litres of tequila can be extracted from just one piña.

Next, we drive to the Sauza distillery. On its wall is a huge mural, in flamboyant Mexican style. I see sun gods, snakes breathing fire, maids in fields, conquistadors, slaves, drunkards, Bacchanalian revellers, nude dancing girls, and mules pulling grindstones and carrying piñas.

Inside, barrels of different sizes and ages are stacked like ingots. "Can't we just drink the stuff?" asks John. No, says a man in a helmet. This kill-joy tells us about the four varieties of tequila. The white, or silver, tequila is not aged, and has nothing added to it. The gold has had colour and caramel added. Thereposado ("rested") tequilas have been kept in casks for two months. The anejo has been stored in oak casks for a year. The straw colouring of some tequilas is often artificial colouring. So which is the best, someone asks? "All of them," interrupts the Oaxacan patriarch, at once. We laugh, thirstily.
To judge by the smart premises, tequila is big business. Sauza is one of the five biggest tequila companies. The Lafitte Rothschild of tequila? "Yes, the company is doing well," says one guide. "But poor Mr Sauza. One of his sons went to Brazil and died, while the other went to New York and became gay. Now he has only his daughter to run the factory for him."

It is time for a drink. We are hit by the sound of machinery and a smell of Christmas pudding, which turns out to be fermenting liquor. We are in the factory. At one end, a pile of agave piñas – at the other, fermenting agave juice. Here, conveyors carry piñas to ovens; there the piñas are crushed and shredded to extract the juice. Eventually, I find myself staring into a 500,000-litre fermentation vat full of syrup-coloured agave-juice, a liquid known as aquamiel, or honey-water.

Finally, we get to the tasting. We drink the liquor neat, with salt and lime only for emergencies. The flavour of some tequilas is similar to that of whiskies and brandies. I buy a bottle of straw-coloured reposado, John and Liz take a selection, and the Oaxacan patriarch settles for a barrel. All return to Guadalajara, profoundly happy.

Siberia: Curses, it's cold

Okay, Siberia is steel-splinteringly, mind-shatteringly cold. But supernaturally cold?

By Jeremy Atiyah

Published: 21 January 2002

What? The locals couldn't stand the cold? In Siberia? The news was enough, this time last year, to get me on the first plane to Irkutsk: destination, mid-winter. And it seemed to be true. This was no ordinary Siberian cold. From Novosibirsk to Vladivostok, last January, the talk was of nothing but unprecedented, steel-splintering cold. Of failing hot-water pumps, of destroyed machinery, of wolves in the streets, of men and women turning up as frozen meat in their own beds. It was as though this gentle but tortured land had not quite suffered enough already.

From Irkutsk, I was soon at Lake Baikal, the emotional heartland of Siberia. A sacred place, people said; sacred to the Buryats, the local indigenous people. I recall sitting in a giant quilted coat, with Russian friends, in the back of a van, heading through sunny snowfields in the direction of Olkhon island, asking the obvious question: "Why is it so bloody cold?" What kind of impiety had been committed (I might have added), to prompt Buryat gods to start freeze-drying an entire continent? A regal Russian friend called Natasha began to chuckle. "Well funny you should mention it ..."
Things did sound bad. Olkhon island, at the best of times, was parched, bitter and haunted by spirits of the past. It was surrounded by white shifting ice in winter, black storm-blasted waters in summer. Buryat shamans had regarded its rocks as holy since their formation, and geologically speaking, this meant something: at 25 million years old, Baikal was a thousand times older than the typical fresh-water lake. Old enough – I reckoned – to have spawned whole nations of fulminating spirits.
Natasha added: "The shamans wanted nothing built on Olkhon within sight of the shamanic rocks. So, of course, the Communists built the village of Khuzhir right there ..."

With our boxes of food and tins and bottles, we resembled hippies driving to an Arctic Glastonbury. In front sat Olga, a polar bear of a woman, who kept asking when I intended to pour my first vodka-libation to the gods of the lake, ie to have a drink. Beside me was Natasha who, along with her elf-like husband, Nikita, had taken on the responsibility (she laughed, sadly) of keeping Olkhon alive.

Which was another reason for me to be here. One of Natasha's big ideas was to bring in foreign tourists. "They can enjoy Siberian nature at its most beautiful. The island ... the lake ... the water ..."
"In this weather?"

"But the air on Olkhon is so pure. And when the temperature rises to minus 20, you know, it can feel like spring."

At petrol-pumps in the lakeside village of Yelantsy, talk, again, was of thermometers. The attendant, ear-flaps down, griped that his had registered 50 below in the morning. That sounded downright dangerous. In search of reassurance, before crossing the ice to the island, we dropped in at the home of the regional shaman: one Valentin Vladimirovich, locally celebrated for a birth-defect: an auspicious cleft thumb. What could he advise us of Siberia's current woes?

"Lots," Vladimir roared, stomping about his tiny home in giant boots. "See this thumb of mine? It means I am marked by the god! I can perform rituals! I help people who are in trouble with the spirits! If a family's sons have been drowned off Olkhon, it means they need to appease the spirits of the water! So I take them to Baikal, and offer milk and prayers ..."

Olkhon, I could already see, was a place that needed delicate handling. Directly to the east of the island, where the lake plunges to appalling depths, the waters are lashed by winds of 100mph or more. Buryat legend spoke of hostile gods residing there, whose sport was to drown fishermen. Foremost of these was Burkhan; then came Doshkin-noyon, god of storms, specialising in stealing the bodies of the dead ... Old superstitious nonsense, of course. Who really believed in shamanism these days, I asked?
"Everyone!" put in the shaman. "It is in our genes! We cannot imagine life without it! Hospitals need
rituals, schools need rituals, families need rituals. Otherwise we get trouble! And bad dreams!"

What about bad weather, I wondered? But suddenly Natasha leapt up in alarm. It was almost dark! We needed to get going if we were to cross Baikal's ice in safety.

It was by moonlight that our van finally creaked a slippery path across the frozen lake. Faults and fissures loomed up in the headlights. Olga had insisted that we drink vodka before crossing, offering one glass to Baikal as we did so. Natasha now admitted that she was afraid. "The god of the lake isn't always so friendly," she half-gasped. Burkhan sends two or three cars plunging through the ice each year.

By the time we reached the island, the moon and the stars were setting the snow aglitter. An hour later ­ at the village of Khuzhir ­ I found myself in a jumble of wooden cottages, each with its chimney, each set in its silver cloud of smoke. The thermometer on the door stood at -40C as I entered Natasha's candle-lit kitchen.

Dinner had a Baikal theme to it: fish soup, fish dumplings and fish cutlets, eaten in a witch's kitchen of smoking stoves, bubbling cauldrons and unidentified wenches with pink cheeks and ice on their lashes. The only interruption came from two men in dark hats who briefly appeared at the door without knocking. "They want to sell us 7,000 fish," sighed Natasha. "What can we do with 7,000 more fish?"
Later, I slept under a sooty ceiling, beside a stove the size of a house, while dogs, or wolves, howled at the moon outside.

Could I have guessed which century this was, when I finally awoke, the next day, to a pale pink dawn? Outside the kitchen window, cocoons of fur enveloped in steam were wandering past. I breakfasted on kasha (buckwheat porridge), while Olga, commanding the table in a fur hat, was using brute force to chop frozen fish.

Over sweet tea, Natasha murmured anxiously: "Rural life is like this everywhere, no? Even in England?" A cat popped up on her lap, knocking over a candle. The Communists built Khuzhir in an age that cared less for appeasing the spirits of nature, than for extracting fish on an industrial scale. Now the village, like much of Siberia, has been marooned by history. Villagers comb hair from their dogs to spin into wool from which to knit their gloves. They have no phones and no running water. Electricity comes every second day only, for a few hours. But right now, full of porridge, I strolled out into bright sunshine, having forgotten, briefly, about the temperature. Within minutes, my hat and scarf were white with hoarfrost and my Italian walking boots had become £100 blocks of ice. I sprinted back to cadge a pair of £3 valenki, the huge Siberian boots of felt. Now I would look like a bear, but my feet were warm.

With mangy, fur-frosted dogs at my heels ("They can smell the good life," Natasha told me later), I walked to a perfect circular bay, defined on both sides by soaring crags. One of these was the shamanic rock: a holy spot for Buryat people since the beginning of time; the spot defiled by the building of Khujir. From beside a solitary pine tree, I stared out across the vastness of Baikal. For a few short weeks in summer, people would lie here on sandy beaches. Now, as I stepped onto the lake's frozen surface, a mysterious underwater twanging reached my ears: the voice of Burkhan, suggesting ­ I fancied ­ prudence.

It was hard to avoid the conclusion, at that place, that Siberia was dead or dying. Baikal, this divinity of such awesome power, seemed to have been caught in a sudden cataclysm. Its waves had been stilled in mid-motion. Its cliffs were clad in thick milky white ice, draped like rows of colossal teeth. A scientist. arriving from another planet, would declare that, yes, life had once existed here ­ millions of years ago.

I supposed it was this threat of extinction that kept Natasha dreaming. She wanted to save her community from petrification. "Yes, we distribute money locally on behalf of charities," she explained, as we crunched through the frost-stricken village later, in search of friends. "We try to create work here for the villagers, by bringing tourists. But it is difficult to change mentalities here. We have to supervise everything. Things always get a little bit lost, a little bit forgotten, a little bit broken. People are born pessimistic in these villages."

To me this urbane young mother with her self-deprecating laugh, towering over the village girls, resembled an old-fashioned aristocrat, giving cookery lessons to her villagers. Together we dropped in on a pretty, cheerful woman called Natalia, to taste her preserved mushrooms.

Natalia promptly showed me an underground cellar packed floor-to-ceiling with jars. "Since moving to Olkhon I've had time on my hands," she began gabbling. "So my daughter and I have joined a movement! It is a mix of science and religion. We don't drink, don't eat meat, don't smoke! But we swim in cold water! It's great! We live in harmony with the universe."

There she sat, smiling in her dressing gown, over mushrooms, quibbling with her daughter on theology: a perfect example of end-of-world, Olkhon-induced, spiritual otherness. "Will you come swimming with us tomorrow?" she now asked. "In a hole in the ice? It will help purify your soul."
There were some strange people in this village, but strangest of all were the normal ones. Natasha later led me to the house of the director of the local school, a quiet man with thick, silver hair, named Ivan Ivanovich. In darkness, over home-cooked doughnuts, he told me that the school at Khuzhir had no fewer than 300 pupils. Did these children know, I wondered, that they lived in the coldest inhabited place on earth? "We have no new books, no furniture, no equipment," said Ivan Ivanovich, in a gloomy voice. "The temperature in the sports hall sometimes drops to minus 20. Our electricity supply comes from the fish factory's generator. If that fails then the school pipes will burst and the damage will not be repaired."

Ivan Ivanovich was an educated man, but to survive he still had to go to the mountains to collect hay in summer, to feed his cows, to obtain milk for the children. "You see, if you can survive here," smiled Natasha, "you can survive anywhere."

But were people surviving? I was still not convinced. For the ultimate test, I set out the next morning over the ice of Baikal, in search of Olkhon's lifeblood: fish. Three local teenage boys would guide me. Having just spent 30 minutes on his back in impacted snow to fix his father's truck's radiator, the oldest, Sergei, looked as though he had escaped from the battle for Stalingrad, with uncombed hair and cheeks streaked with grease.

An hour later, standing on ghostly transparent ice beside the truck, miles from shore, I felt scared. A fearful wind was getting up. Burkhan was restless. How could this be safe? But now two of the boys were digging a one-metre-deep hole in the ice. Another was erecting a canvas tent, with what looked like a chimney attached. And yes, minutes later, we were all seated inside the tent, around a glowing, steaming blue hole in the ice, next to a roaring stove. What was more, we were soon pulling up netted omul (the local equivalent to trout) by the dozen. "All hungry?" shouted Sergei, cutting open a fish and sprinkling it with salt and pepper. I anticipated a fry-up.

Wrong! Sergei now threw the fish outside the tent, onto the ice. We would eat it raw - frozen solid - with vodka. The Russians called it raskalotka; I called it Siberian ice-cream. It was pure bounty, granted by the beneficence of the lake.

"For raskalotka, the colder the better," cackled Sergei. His schoolboy eyes refocused on the net, and, with a lump in my throat, I felt that I had glimpsed the true meaning of human resilience. Siberia, even in a winter like this one, would always survive with little heroes like these.


The Facts

Getting there
Jeremy Atiyah flew from Britain to Moscow as a guest of Austrian Airlines (0845 6010948; www.aua.com). Irkutsk is linked by both the Trans-Siberian railway (88 hours) and direct flights (four hours) to Moscow. Return flights from Moscow to Irkutsk with Aeroflot (020-7491 1764; www.aeroflot.com) cost about £120 each way, if booked in the UK, less if booked in Russia. Return air fares from the UK right through to Irkutsk via Moscow usually cost between £450 and £500.


Olkhon Island is about 350km (200 miles), and a five-hour drive, north of the city of Irkutsk. There is no regular transport but lifts can be arranged easily to and from the island. In winter, vehicles drive across the ice; in summer they go on a ferry. For short periods in spring and autumn, when the ice is too thin to carry cars but too thick to permit the ferry, the island is inaccessible.

In Irkutsk, ask about staying with Nikita and Natasha, through the Aqua-Eco travel agency (00 7 3952 201000; aqua@ angara.ru). Nikita and Natasha also have an email which they check two or three times a month (Nikita@ olkhon.irkutsk.ru).