Last stop for the man who has been everywhere

Jeremy Atiyah meets the youngest person to have travelled the world

Jeremy Atiyah 

Sunday, 23 November 1997

Not even the threat of war, nor nuclear attack, could have stopped Phil Haines from going on holiday to Iraq last week. While US and British forces menaced the Gulf, he and a few friends were cheerfully speeding towards the almost deserted Karameh border post - and a remarkable record.

For the trip to Saddam's fiefdom meant he was calling on the last and only country on earth which he had not visited. Mr Haines has now been, quite literally, everywhere, and, at just 35, claims to be the youngest person to have been to all 192 sovereign countries recognised by the United Nations.

Mr Haines is charmingly modest about his achievement. "I haven't yet been to all the dependent territories," he explained. In other words, he hasn't been to places like Pitcairn Island or Antarctica, meaning he is not quite the world's best travelled man. That honour belongs to John D Clouse from Indiana, who has done all the sovereign countries and all but six dependent territories.

Phil is not after publicity, nor has he had sponsors following him in emergency vehicles. He has done it, it seems, for the hell of it. "My parents have hardly been out of Middlesex and it was only at the age of 16 that I first went abroad," he says. "That was when I got a bit obsessive. When people were doing InterRail, I was going from Morocco to Norway to Turkey in one trip."

Ticking off the world's countries was something he started a decade ago, by which stage he already had a good 80 under his belt - all the easy ones, he admits. The last 50 or so have been "all the nightmare ones". The list of his latest holidays reads like a list of war zones: Afghanistan, Angola, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia and now Iraq.

But the timing of his Iraq trip hardly ruffled him at all. "I'm used to bad situations," he says. "When I arrived in Monrovia recently, the immigration official put a gun to my chest and said, 'Welcome to Liberia'. I shook the gun as if I was shaking his hand. He liked that. I know how to avoid trouble."

Not that safety has been his main preoccupation - visas have been the thing. Mr Haines spends most of his time negotiating visa applications in stuffy consulates. "When I'm in a place like Djibouti or Albania, I'll always pop into, say, the Angolan embassy, in case they're in a good mood. Procuring visas is a job in itself," he says.

Which is just as well, because Mr Haines, who describes himself as "a bit of a bum", only works to get money for his next trip. And a "trip" can be an extensive affair; he once bought a single air ticket with 40 destinations on it. Which is not to say he never travels for pleasure. The favourite places of the man who has been everywhere are South-east Asia and Polynesia.

He has documented all his trips with immigration stamps. "You need to go through immigration," he explains. "That proves you've been to a country. Just landing at the airport doesn't count." He has got through 10 large- sized passports. Only in the case of his attempted visit to Libya does Mr Haines confess he stretched his own rules.

"I had a visa and landed in the country, but they never stamped my passport - in fact, the immigration officials physically attacked me. But I did spend a couple of days locked up in the airport before they expelled me, and I think that deserves to count."

Can't stop, I'm doing the Canary Islands' perpetual motion cultural desert tour

Restless Jeremy Atiyah turned his back on lazy Lanzarote's stationary beach bums and scurried round four islands in a single day

Jeremy Atiyah 

Sunday, 9 November 1997

The stationary version of the Canary Islands holiday involves flying for four hours from Britain to islands with funny names but no identifiable location on the weather map.

The temperature is 25 degrees C, the cuisine is strangely familiar, the local people might be described as international types. Welcome to a country without a context. Why not call it Holidayland?

But is there anything remotely exciting in Holidayland? Not much, unless you are eighteen and single. Otherwise, you'll need the motion version of the Canary Islands holiday.

And the motion version requires context. You need to know for example that the Canaries comprise seven main islands, starting just 50 miles off the southern coast of Morocco and spanning 300 miles from east to west.

You also need to understand that the islands closest to Africa (Lanzarote and Fuerteventura) are virtually extensions of the Sahara Desert, while the islands furthest away (La Palma and Hierro) are relatively green and wet.

On the cultural front, it might help to know that the islands have been ruled by the Spanish since the fifteenth century, with the archipelago's original inhabitants (the Guanches) having disappeared virtually without trace.

Nothing too onerous there then. I chose a motion holiday taking in the main holiday centres. To make it really exciting, I would do it all in a single day: a round trip from Tenerife, via Lanzarote, Fuerteventura and Gran Canaria - with no stopping allowed.

Breakfast: Funny how the north coast of Tenerife is green and hilly like the Dordogne. Funny because the rest of the island comprises barren volcanic rock that looks as if it has been worked over by a cosmic bulldozer.

Anyway, the 8am flight to Arrecife on Lanzarote takes 45 minutes (another 15 minutes in the same direction and we would be hitting Morocco).

From Lanzarote airport, stationary tourists head for Playa del Carmen; motion tourists jump into taxis and head south. "We like English tourists," explains my taxi driver. "But it is strange that you eat only English food and drink English beer. Are you not interested in our country?"

What country? Actually, the landscape here is just how England would look if no rain fell for about 50 years. There are brown, bald hills and relics of ancient agriculture; old walled plantations where tomatoes and water-melons once ripened, interspersed by white villages. On the right a colossal black larva plain ripples away into the horizon.

Twenty minutes later, and I'm done with this place. At Playa Blanca, on the southern tip of Lanzarote, I await the ferry to Fuerteventura. Here on the edge of the desert lies a small resort village of whitewashed cottages, Marrakesh-style hexagonal towers and palm trees. The waters are clean and a dessicating wind blows in from the shores of Africa.

Lunch: The boat journey to Fuerteventura takes just 35 minutes. I vaguely expect to find the boat full of Canarian commuters in suits, until I remember that this is a Sunday. Hence the day trippers decked out in trilbies.

My first view of Fuerteventura is of a sandy plain, a heat haze and air thick with dust. A colossal ziggurat seems to rise like a monument from old Babylon; this turns out to be a tourist hotel.

Fuerteventura is almost pure desert. And Corralejo, the small resort on the northern tip of the island, is a two-horse, shutter-banging-in- the-wind, vulture-wheeling-in-the-sky kind of resort. The main drag is bleak and hot, and restaurants have names like Willy's Pizzeria. "Drink two-and-a-quarter pints in 25 seconds and get it free", announces a sign in one pub. Opposite the small town beach rises the Isla de los Lobos, a black slag heap in the middle of the bay.

The serious beaches though are outside town. I see a sign pointing south to the "Grandes Playas". I tell myself that Saudi Arabia probably has some great beaches too. Catching a bus south from Corralejo, I pass the ziggurat, and giant sand vistas begin filling my horizon. The buttocks of tiny nude tourists can be glimpsed scuttling up and down the dunes like crabs.

Puerto de Rosario, the capital city of Fuerteventura, is a half-hour drive to the south. It's another dead little place, containing a blinding white church and a hot square where the entire populace gathers under a shady bandstand to drink beer on Sunday afternoons. I am in far too much of a hurry to join them.

Dinner: Instead it is time to move east, on the 2pm flight to Gran Canaria. In the airport bookshop I stumble across a fascinating little volume about the Guanchos, who are thought to be related to the Berbers of Morocco. These people not only developed the world's first whistling language but also learnt the skill of bounding around mountainous terrain on long poles at dizzying speed. The book strikes me as a small step along the road towards proclaiming an independence movement. Nowadays, trendy Canarians name their daughters after Guanchos princesses.

From the air, the true desolation of Fuerteventura is revealed in its dusty magnificence. Only the western hills reveal the faintest of green fuzzes, before we are jumping over the sea to Gran Canaria.

The two desert islands I have seen this morning do not prepare me for Las Palmas, the main city of the Canary Islands. This turns out to be a huge metropolis marooned in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, with roaring expressways lined by high-rise buildings.

Dazed, I wander into the old city, La Vegueta. Sweaty youths in basketball shirts lope past in pursuit of girls with delicate eyebrows. Old ladies lean over wrought-iron balconies, tiny cars muscle up tiny streets. Outrageous floral flourishes in plaster adorn the facades. I keep wondering whether this is Third World or First; the higher I walk the more precarious and provisional the houses become, like a Rio favela. Is this perhaps a Latin American city?

A stocky man in sunglasses who is washing his car vigorously looks up. "What do you expect?" he says. "We are half-way between Europe and Latin America. You can fly to Venezuela from here in only six hours."

With the oily broken tarmac, the smell of bubble gum and ducados, the modern buildings and traffic jams, this could easily be Caracas.

Nightcap: Like a vast apparition in the sunset, the volcanic dome of Mount Teide, Spain's tallest mountain, looms up out of the island of Tenerife, one hundred miles away across the dark sea. The highway along the north coast of Gran Canaria to the ferry port is as busy as the M25 during rush- hour but I am more stunned by the view.

We board in darkness, under a warm wind. Passengers range from glamorous Spaniards to chunky Canarians. There are no foreign tourists. The ship has boutiques, a bar and a restaurant and I feel like I must be in Dover.

Arrival at Sta Cruz de Tenerife is around 10.30pm. The crowds evaporate and I wander alone into town. There are cheap pensiones in these streets, where a bed will cost pounds 8 a night. It's time to get stationary.

Canary fact file

When to go

The weather in the Canary Islands is drier and sunnier in Lanzarote and Fuerteventura than in Tenerife. Nevertheless, all the islands are pleasantly mild in summer and winter alike.

Stationary holidays

Hundreds, if not thousands, of packages are available at any time of year, including large numbers of last-minute deals. Check teletext or visit a travel agent. Prices range from around pounds 200 to pounds 400 per person per week in a self-catering apartment, including flights from almost any airport in Britain. Quality of accommodation is not always high.

Motion holidays

All the islands are linked by ferry services. Sample prices on Fred Olsen Lines include Lanzarote to Fuerteventura: Pts 1,800 (pounds 8), and Gran Canaria to Tenerife: Pts 2,700 (pounds 12). Discounts for under-26s available. Buy tickets locally.

Flights on the local domestic airline Binter link up most of the islands. To book from the UK, call Iberia on 0171 830 0011. Sample fares include Tenerife to Lanzarote (pounds 43, plus tax, one way) and Fuerteventura to Gran Canaria (pounds 29, plus tax, one way).

Flight-only deals from Britain to the Canary Islands - to any of the islands - can start from around pounds 100 or even less on a last-minute charter seat booked through a tour operator. If you want scheduled flights, Monarch Airlines (01582 398333) flies direct, twice a week, from Luton to Tenerife. The fare until 18 December is pounds 170, plus pounds 14 tax.

Operators who offer tailor-made trips taking in some or all of the Canary Islands include Mundi Color (0171 282 6021), who also offer a cruise of the islands starting from the UK, Sovereign First Choice (01293 560777), Inntravel (01653 628811) and Magic of Spain (0181 748 4220).

Could the end of the dope holiday really be nigh?

JEREMY ATIYAH 

Sunday, 2 November 1997

What worries me about the possible decriminilisation of cannabis is that people will have one less reason to travel. Going abroad in search of dope is one of those honourable traditions that Bohemians, hippies and new-age travellers will one day look back on with tears of nostalgia.

All backpackers worth their salt know what it is to sleep in smoky Bombay dormitories with self-righteously dirty Austrians and Germans, who suddenly whip crafted pipes out of their clothing just at the moment your eyes were about to close in sleep.

The elaborate lighting-up ceremonies, the smoky suckings and puffings, the silent offering around of the pipe like a sacred talisman; these rituals mean as much for travel as Delhi belly and the InterRail card.

And look at those generations of students riding the waves to Holland every Christmas vacation. As we all know, ragged young intellectuals do not cross the North Sea for tulips or the Van Gogh Museum. They go for dingy peace cafes where spliffs appear on the menu next to the mushroom quiche.

In years gone by, the further you travelled the further the view disappeared into aromatic smoke. Before the war the place to smoke a pipe was China. Shanghai was so sinful that a blast of opium before bed was as respectable as a glass of sherry.

In the Fifties it was Saigon and Hong Kong that filled with travelling dope-smokers, while the Sixties saw dope shops spring up on the road to Goa like garrison cities on the Silk Road. Istanbul's famous Pudding Shop was where you stocked up on the stuff before taking the long dope road to India and Nepal. And if you couldn't make it to Katmandhu you took the short cut to Marrakesh instead.

Otherwise you went to countries where the whole local culture revolved around "substances". Countries such as Columbia where a mouthful of coca leaves was the local equivalent to a mid-morning coffee, or the Yemen where cabinet ministers chewed qat to discuss the national budget.

Meanwhile, airports from New York to Singapore crunched to the sound of dope being walked on, hidden inside travellers' shoes, while rucksacks swilled with cannabis fragments disguised as bits of dirt. Personally I call it madness, but there is no end to the madness of people who associate dope with travel.

And yet how things have changed. Smoking dope in Tony Blair's Britain seems such a tame affair compared to the same, heart-stoppingly dangerous offence in, say, King Hassan's Morocco or Lee Kwan Yew's Singapore.

It won't be long before long-haired dropouts from the universities of Delhi and Bombay start making pilgrimmages to British seaside resorts, where they will play didgereedoos and relax naked under the stars. The curious residents of Bournemouth and Brighton will earn pocket money by selling dope to naked junkies.

Still later, in a long overdue act of retribution, the Chinese will send their gunboats and force us to buy dope by the tonne, whether we like it or not. We will no longer need to travel for our dope and the tides of cultural history will have changed yet again.

Don't blow your nose in Japan! You might upset the locals - or would you?

JEREMY ATIYAH 

Sunday, 12 October 1997

Years ago, I was dining in Oxford with a Japanese tourist when suddenly a guest on a neighbouring table let out an explosive, barked belch. My Japanese friend's eyes widened in astonishment. "Ahh," he murmured. "In Japan this is...not possible."

So no belching in Japan then. And before my trip to Tokyo last week, the other big thing that everybody assured me was "not possible" was nose- blowing in public.

From the Japanese point of view (know-all friends insisted), bodily effluents were bodily effluents, regardless of the orifice from which they emerged. Putting a snotty handkerchief into my pocket would be the equivalent of something quite unspeakable over on this side of the world.

But what if I caught a cold on the flight over to Tokyo? According to my latter-day cultural relativists, the correct behaviour in the circumstances would be to keep sniffing until I could reach the privacy of the nearest bathroom. Blowing my nose behind a locked door would not, apparently, be a problem.

In fact nose-blowing was not the only catastrophic faux pas that dumb tourists might commit in Japan. More serious still would be to traipse my muddy shoes around the inside of somebody's house, grubbying the tatami of my hosts. Worst of all, so I learnt, would be to jump into the communal bath without rinsing off my soap suds first. Of course, I had no intention of dirtying anybody's tatami or of fouling their bath-water. But I wonder how many people would really have minded if I had, say, given my nose just a tiny little blow?

The fact is that none of these supposedly immutable laws of behaviour are really as rigid as they seem. Look at the British, for example: according to Japanese guidebooks, it is extremely important for visitors to Britain to talk politely about the weather with the locals. But is it essential?

Sometimes we just get it wrong. We all know the experience of dressing up from head to toe in preparation for visiting Islamic countries, only to discover, on arrival, that the locals are actually wearing shorts and mini-skirts. In other cases, we cast political correctness to the wind and decide that our own customs are better. In China, it is normal to spit in public places, but I have never heard of any tourist in China deliberately taking up spitting specifically to put the locals at their ease. We congratulate those few Chinese who ape Western habits by refraining from spitting in our presence.

Lots of cases though are much more tricky. When I visited Iran, for example, I had been told on no account to attempt to shake hands with local women. The snag was that Iranian women had equally been told that they were on no account to refuse the proffered hands of Western tourists (who have a strict habit of shaking hands with everything and everyone they meet). The result was a cultural impasse, with me nervously withdrawing my hand as the ladies were nervously putting theirs out.

Iranians apeing the West? Quite the opposite. They were, in fact, asserting their cultural independence by showing me that they knew as much about me as I did about them. And this was all very alarming to my comfortable assumptions. After all, I was the one who was supposed to know about the locals, not the other way round. In contrast to sophisticated tourists, locals were supposed to be blissfully unaware of the possibility of cultural choice.

Basically, battle has been joined. There is a mortal struggle going on around the world between locals and tourists to get the better of each other. And one thing I learnt in Japan was that the Japanese, predictably, are racing ahead of the game. In upmarket hotels, for example, staff have been trained to respond differently to guests of different nationalities. To Japanese guests they bow and lower their eyes. To Americans they grin and catch the eye and exclaim, "How you doing?"

To passing Brits, for all I know, they are being trained to doff their caps and belch.

Tokyo: it helps if you're short and thin

Love in a city where there's barely room to stand; tradition nestling up against modernity. Jeremy Atiyah tackles the big themes Japanese-style

Jeremy Atiyah 

Sunday, 12 October 1997

You don't have to be an adulterer but it probably helps. The love hotel I visited had dimly lit torsos of naked Greek gods in the foyer. A digitally recorded voice whispered irrishaimase ("welcome!") and doors closed secretively behind my back.

Sleaze? No, just anonymity, Japanese-style, though as it happened a couple of flushed high-school kids were shuffling out as I entered. Nobody cared. The receptionist was behind an opaque wall of frosted glass but we couldn't resist bending to peer politely at each other through the ticket window. I booked a room at pounds 25 for the hour. Here in the Shibuya district, upmarket love hotels have rooms with names like the Graceland Suite. Mine just offered the basics: a nicely packaged condom on the pillow, a dispensing machine with dildos, potency tablets and anal vibrators. I availed myself of the coffee making facilities, reclined on the futon and turned on the TV. All in all, a highly convenient way to kill a couple of hours on a rainy Tokyo afternoon.

The Japanese capital was not just a city of vast corporations, expressways and smog, then. I was doing a round of Tokyo's hotels, in search of its various faces and love had seemed the finest place to start.

Out in Shibuya after dark, towering blocks were ablaze with neon. Problems such as ageing did not occur here. Ranks of divinely young people, 20 or 30 deep, floated leisurely across the roads. Dudes with long hair and suntans stood on corners; crowds of decadent girls flowed from department stores.

Tokyo high-school girls have the city in uproar this year at the shortness of their skirts and the bareness of their legs - a uniform dreamt up by a bureaucrat in a love hotel if ever there was one. Only the schoolboys seemed to be elsewhere. Perhaps they were playing sado-masochistic computer games, or reading manga, the ubiquitous Japanese comics that lend new meaning to the term "strip" cartoon.

I had never seen such crowds. Central stations like Shinjuku are used by two million people daily. At rush hour the halls and stairways were a blurring frenzy of salarymen and secretaries, shoppers and school-children, pressing lost tourists into corners. Branching out into a warren of passageways, underground arcades and halls, this station could take an hour to cross, even if you did know where you were going.

So love was eclipsed by Tokyo's second face: overcrowding. Only in Tokyo could people sleep in capsules, like bees in a beehive. Capsule hotels imply lack of space but also modern urban technology. I wanted to sleep in one.

There were no English signs to go on, only instructions from a budget guide book. I descended from the world of neon and crowded sushi bars into a windowless empty hall that smelt of cleaning polish. At the lobby I stood nervously at the edge of a carpet while a receptionist gestured frantically at my shoes. Step one: take them off.

The hotel was a male sanctuary, an overflow from the streets outside. Men in dressing gowns sat about quietly in lounges, samurai warrior-style, with no buttons but powerful belts. I was given a numbered key. What? Was I really expected to squeeze into that tin box?

Actually that was the locker. But the capsules themselves were barely larger. Made of fibreglass with inbuilt TVs, they were stacked grimly one above the other along narrow corridors like monastic cells. Step two: take an evening bath.

At this point, things got very Japanese; a steamy room in which naked men sat on tiny benches, lathering and dousing themselves. Luckily they were too polite to stare at the white, hairy foreigner.

After the private soaping, I was supposed to sink into the mammoth hot bath that filled the centre of the room (after rinsing off the soap, of course. Failure to comply with this first law of bathing etiquette is considered grounds for ritual disembowelment. Bathing is taken seriously in Japan).

I had a great bath but a shocking night's sleep. Crawling into my capsule, I pulled down a blind and lay in darkness, surrounded on three sides by the muffled sounds of snoring, farting, and groaning from pornographic videos. It was Sunday. "Sunday have free adult video service," had been the receptionist's only words of English.

Yes, Tokyo is world capital of the art of packing things into small spaces. Bonsai trees were the opener which have now led to cameras and mobile phones the size of chrysanthemum petals. And you thought Japan was expensive? Cameras here are half the price of their equivalents back home.

Eating also takes place in unimaginable smallness. Sushi-by-conveyor- belt is one way of packing customers beside narrow bars rather than wasting space on tables and aisles. It, too, comes amazingly cheap, at around 80p a plate. As for noodle bars, even in opulent Ginza you can find yourself in front of steaming bowls, with dainty girls slurping noisily at your elbow.

Tokyo has always been crowded, even if its centre has shifted around over the years. Ginza became the city's showcase after Japan opened its doors to the world in 1868. In recent years, booming commercial areas like Shinjuku, Shibuya and Ikebukuro have sprung up around rail junctions.

But the old shitamachi, or downtown - Ueno and Asakusa in the north - still have a different atmosphere. I found streets here faintly shabby, with lines of tiny stores and local people slurping noodles. Men with flannels coiled round their heads shouted the price of crab in Ueno fish market, and local tramps had established a village of tarpaulin tents in the park.

The hey-day of the shitamachi passed away with the devastating Tokyo earthquake of 1923, in which nearly 150,000 died. But for a glimpse of old Tokyo I dropped in on the Shitamachi Museum in Ueno where a neighbourhood has been reconstructed, including wooden phone boxes, rickshaws and rickety houses with sliding partitions. The spirit of the capsule hotel was born in those narrow wood-paved alleyways.

If lack of space is the second face of Tokyo, tradition is the third. For my next night I chose a ryokan (Japanese inn), all futons, sliding partitions and tatami floors. The Kimi Ryokan was the cheapest in the whole of Tokyo - I paid less than pounds 20 for a single room - and no Japanese would have been seen dead in it. But it introduced me to 2,000 years of civilisation.

For like London, Tokyo has been an imperial city. But unlike London, there is no equivalent to the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, no Mall, no royal parks. There is just a single, isolated imperial palace in the centre of town. The map of Tokyo's underground network is designed round the palace like stars round the sun.

But approaching it on a murky, rainy Saturday afternoon did not feel like walking into the sun. Suddenly the crowds of beautiful people were gone. The great grey boulders of the wall round the imperial gardens were stained wet. Swans sat on the black waters of the moat.

Menacing or a secret pleasure garden? Hard to say, but a sudden explosion of trees gave hints of the latter. And what trees: these were Bonsais in reverse, delicate and wiry yet not confined to a flowerpot. A rolling lawn, smooth as paper, was dotted with spiney pine trees from a scroll painting.

All entrances to the inner garden were guarded by polite guards. The grandest entrance, the Nishu-bashi Bridge over the moat, could only be viewed from a distance. But behind the bridge, rearing up from behind trees in the rain, I caught a glimpse of heavy roof-tiles and upsweeping eaves - the inner sanctum of the palace itself.

But if the emperor was inaccessible to tourists, traditional performance arts such as Kabuki and Noh were less so. Down the road from the palace, in Ginza, is old Tokyo's answer to the Karaoke bar: the Kabukiza, or Kabuki theatre.

I had been advised to choose Kabuki rather than Noh on the grounds that Noh was dull and obscure and Kabuki action-filled and easy. Still not convinced I'd manage four hours, I bought a ticket for a single scene and pounds 2.50 got me a seat on the balcony. A stream of geisha girls with white masks and pink kimonos sat on the floor against a gilt backdrop. Two characters with high-pitched voices joined in an interminable dialogue. Inexplicable shouting from the audience burst out periodically, as if this were a Punch and Judy show. Action-filled and easy? Luckily a visit to a Noh performance was not on my agenda.

My search for tradition again took me to Ueno, where the National Museum commands the park. The main wing dates to the 1930s, the height of Japanese militarism, and its glowering eaves and monumental tiled roofline present a sinister profile. But inside I loved the costumes of the Samurai, the fighters who served Japan's feudal lords into the last century. With short, wide sleeves and no buttons, these were the model for today's Japanese dressing gowns.

And up in the heart of Akasusa is one of Tokyo's holiest temples, the Senso-ji shrine. There happened to be a Sunday event taking place, involving crowds of Shinto youth in short tunics and pouch briefs, with cloths squeezed between the buttocks, heaving huge wooden litters about. A middle-aged woman squatted to get a photo of one young man from pouch-height. The temple itself was a frenzy of drum beating and coin-throwing as worshippers jostled before the altar.

Did any of that traditional atmosphere survive in the real streets? Beyond Ueno, in Akasusa, I walked past tatty amusement arcades and old biscuit makers, then ducked into a tiny wooden restaurant where men sat along low benches under a nicotine-stained ceiling. The walls were covered in menu details like pages of manuscript. Guests slurped at clear soups of seaweed and fishballs, while bowing waiters rushed to my assistance. My soup cost pounds 2.

But enough with tradition. I now turned to the fourth and final face of Tokyo: the modern, the high-tech and the beautiful. On my last night I stayed in the Park Hyatt, one of the finest modern hotels in the world, filling the top 14 floors of Kenzo Tange's Shinjuku Park Tower. After a deep, private bath, I sat in my Samurai warrior dressing gown admiring original Japanese artworks on the walls and views spanning the murky width of Tokyo from the sea to Mount Fuji.

More evidence of Japan's unique talent for technology could be found in display rooms of the country's mighty corporations. I visited the Sony centre in Ginza, to test out the latest electronic appliances. Forget rainy views of the imperial palace: try instead a Sony Watchman, a glorified pair of sunglasses in which the eye pieces are tiny video screens. Soon we will all be wearing them.

Gadgetry and shopping are the engines of this colossal city. The vast department stores of Ginza, like Mitsukoshi and Wako, with uniformed lift attendants warbling sweetly face-to-the-wall, are palaces of exquisite packaging. In the food hall, even potatoes were gift-wrapped. Every time I raised an eye, high-pitched irrashaimases! chirruped from all directions. The fourth face of Tokyo, in its way, was every bit as charming as the first. Japan Fact file Getting there The author flew as a guest of Virgin Atlantic, which flies non-stop from London Heathrow to Tokyo six times weekly, with convenient departure and arrival times at both ends. For reservations, call 01293 747747. Fares for October/November are pounds 1,053 return in economy.

Budget tickets, via other European cities, can be obtained from around pounds 500. Try Worldwide Flights (0171 388-6000) whose flights on Aeroflot via Moscow cost pounds 517 return.

Accommodation The Kimi Ryokan (0081-3-3971-3766), near Ikebukuro station, has single rooms for just 3,500 yen (pounds 18). Doubles go up to about 7,000 yen (pounds 30). Bathrooms separate.

The Park Hyatt Tokyo (reservations in the UK: 0345 581666) has a supersaver rate of 33,500 yen (about pounds 175) for a double room; standard rates are 46,000 yen (about pounds 240). Add 10 per cent for service charge. The superb Japanese lunch in the ho tel's Kozue restaurant is well worth trying for the combination of food and views; reckon on about pounds 40 a head.

Getting around A taxi to or from Narita airport will cost around pounds 130 (no kidding). Take the limousine bus or the Narita Express train straight into central Tokyo (both about pounds 15). In town the circular Yamamoto train line is most convenient for linkingthe main centres. Single rides cost about pounds 1. There is also an extensive underground system.

Packages The Japan Experience (0703 730830) specialises in city breaks and tailor-made holidays to Japan. Explore Worldwide (01252 319448) offers cheap overland trips.

Information The Japan National Tourist Organisation in London can be contacted on 0171 734-9638. Lonely Planet publishes a reasonably good city guide to Tokyo for pounds 6.95.

The next stop isn't Mount Ararat

Lording it like a pasha, Jeremy Atiyah was loving his train ride from Turkey to Iran. But what the Turks call 'very, very problems' loom...

Jeremy Atiyah 

Sunday, 5 October 1997

Even for a someone who had just whizzed through every train stop between London and Istanbul, en route to Tehran, this was a sensational sight.

With its cathedral-sized columns and shimmering blue tiles overlooking the waters, Haydapasa railway station on the Asian side of Istanbul has barely changed since Ottoman times - since 1908, to be precise, the year it was opened. One could easily imagine that the old trains to Persia, Iraq, Palestine and Hejaz, deep in the Arabian peninsula, still ran from here.

Except that most of these services vanished long ago, scrapped along with the Ottoman Empire itself. Of the international services, only the Tehran train had survived long enough still to be listed on the departure board - long enough, in fact, for me to waste a day trying to book a berth on it. The response to all my queries had been: "No Tehran!"

"But here it is. Look. It's written on the departure board."

"NO TEHRAN!"

It turned out that the direct rail link had been cut because of the Kurdish uprising in the Lake Van area, but no one was willing to spell out this national humiliation for the benefit of visitors. Never mind. I would ride as far as possible by train before continuing by road to the nearest Iranian railhead. I booked a seat to Erzurum, 40 hours to the east, and ducked into the station restaurant.

Mustapha's caff? Tea and sandwiches? Hardly: this was Haydapasa, a palace of stained glass, chandeliers and attentive waiters in starched jackets. I ordered beer and shish and waited for my departure.

After dinner I dragged my bags into the cold night air in search of the Erzurum train. The platforms were deserted. I saw a line of cold, dark carriages. But when I asked a passing guard about my berth, he shook my hand joyously. "Erzurum!" he exclaimed, before unlocking a carriage door, turning on the light and putting an entire wagon at my disposal.

No pasha could have travelled in finer style. My compartment - which I had paid US$8 (pounds 5) to reserve - contained a real bed with sheets and blankets, a washbasin, clean towel and orientalist reproduction prints of 19th-century Istanbul on the walls. Even the toilet down the corridor was useable. Best of all, however, was the fact that I was next to the restaurant car. As the train pulled out of the station, I dropped off to sleep with the scent of sweet tea and baklava in my nostrils.

Shaving is never such fun as in a train. The first morning, with the frosty Anatolian steppe trundling past my window, I lathered my chin while watching vast landscapes of rock, yellow scrub and distant plains giving way to untrodden hills pass before me. Here and there traces of civilisation cropped up - golden corn stubble, scratched soil, a village in a puddle of green grass. I finished shaving and stepped outside for a breakfast of goat's cheese, olives, bread and tea.

But this joy was not to last. In Ankara, it was decided "for technical reasons" that my wagon needed to be replaced. The passengers - myself, a soldier and his wife - had to relocate to a new, icy-cold carriage with no restaurant. "Very, very problem," the attendant sighed. He was right; from Ankara there were still 28 hours of lonely hillsides, frosty dawns, yellowing birch trees and huddled sheep before Erzurum.

By the next morning I was alone and shivering in my compartment, gnawing on bread and soggy cheese. Outside, the skies of Eastern Anatolia were brilliant blue, and patches of grassland - the Central Asian steppe - had begun appearing in luminous streaks. Snowy peaks towered from the edge of the valley. The human presence had been reduced to the occasional line of military style barracks. Erzurum, when I finally disembarked, felt like humanity's last line of defence. I boarded the first bus to Dogubayazit, five hours away, with some anxiety.

Were there Kurdish separatists hiding in those dark, craggy hillsides? The road to Dogubayazit ran through snow-covered fields that gave off a sinister light long after nightfall. We passed miserable villages huddled in wreaths of smoke. The only available food seemed to be the piles of gigantic cabbages by the roadside, fodder for the winter. Dogubayazit itself - the last bus stop in Turkey - was deserted except for a stubby armoured personnel carrier charging round in the darkness.

At dawn the traders emerged. I awoke to find the town under a layer of smoky fog, with the colossal peak of Mount Ararat filling half the sky. Ararat, guardian of the passes to Iran! Travellers have been mesmerised by this sight since the days of Cyrus the Great. I approached the border with a gang of Turkish smugglers in a taxi, before being escorted on foot into a series of duty-free shops selling liquor by the crate. A whisky bazaar? An odd introduction to an Islamic republic. I made as if to pick up a crate. The smugglers were alarmed: "You take whisky Iran? Very, very problem!"

Being the first alcohol stop this side of India, the bazaar was presumably for travellers heading west. For me, going east, this last glimpse of shelves stacked with whisky felt like a terminal moment. The next step was through a door with Ayatollah Khomeini's portrait above. I took that step - and found the door promptly locked behind me.

This was Iran. A jostling mass of unshaven men in a cell-like room, lined by tired women in black. No one would leave until the Turkish

smugglers with their fake cut-glass ashtrays and wall clocks had paid their baksheesh.

When I finally emerged into blinding sunlight, taxi drivers homed in like wasps at a picnic. "You are going all the way to the nearest train station?" "A private taxi all the way to Tabriz? You know how far that is?" The collective cheek-blowing and rubbing of fingers and thumbs seemed to suggest colossal money, but nobody wanted more than US$15 for the 300km journey. In minutes I was roaring along a smooth, empty road through the craggy deserts of western Iran.

By Tabriz, three hours later, a warming breeze had set in. The railway station, despite its huge forecourt and cavernous hall, had an oddly languorous, deserted air. At the ticket window, I found a man reading a newspaper surrounded by a crowd of half-sleeping customers. "Sorry," he explained, "We are praying."

I had no objection. Indeed, when prayer-time was over, a cry came down the line that the foreigner should be served first. Strangers thronged to help me buy my ticket and wish me bon voyage.

An hour later I was on the Tehran train, ensconced in a carpeted compartment with three moustachioed men sitting cross-legged and eating saffron rice and chicken from silver trays. In the corridor loitered soldiers, mothers in black and girls with hair spilling out from headscarves. I had come a long way from Waterloo.

The JOURNEY from Waterloo to Turkey begins with Eurostar (0345 881881) to Brussels or Paris. Inter-Rail and Inter-Rail 26+ passes can then be used to travel right through Europe (not France or Belgium in the case of Inter-Rail 26+) to the far east of Turkey. An Inter-Rail ticket valid for one month and covering all zones to Turkey costs pounds 245, while the Inter-Rail 26+ costs pounds 215 for 15 days and pounds 275 for one month (1996 prices). Tickets are available from BR International at Victoria Station in London (0171-834 2345) and from travel agents.

Inside Turkey, comfortable first-class sleeping berths (yakatli) can be reserved for about US$8 (pounds 5) to Erzurum, using the Inter-Rail card. Turkish buses are on average twice as quick as trains, and there are daily direct buses from Istanbul to Tehran (about US$30 one way; the trip takes two days or more).

The route from Erzurum through Dogubayazit to Tabriz in Iran by bus and taxi cost the author about US$22 (pounds 14) in total.

In Iran, train tickets with sleeper reservations in four-person compartments can be bought at short notice and are very cheap; for example, the one- way fare from Tabriz to Tehran (a 12-hour journey) is about US$5.

Return flights between London and Tehran on Iran Air (0171-409 0971) range in cost from pounds 425 to pounds 521; a one-way flight costs pounds 340. There are three weekly flights each way.