Africa's top game show

Jeremy Atiyah sips gin and tonic at sundown in Botswana's swish wildlife parks but misses out on the big adventure

Jeremy Atiyah 

Sunday, 16 May 1999

Botswana, a country twice the size of Britain with fewer than a million citizens, reminds me of a very exclusive club. The Monaco of Africa perhaps. Half of the country is untamed wilderness. Flying above it you see tiny elephants and buffalo ambling through the Mopane trees. It is the ultimate game-viewing paradise.

As you would expect, tourism in Botswana means tiny, ultra-luxury camps in the middle of the Okavango Delta, where wealthy customers are flown in and out on chartered light aircraft. It means, say, eight tourists being catered for by a couple of dozen staff in a 1,000 square-mile park. It is where a semblance of adventure comes face-to-face with gin-and-tonics at sundown and a choice of wines for dinner. Unlike parts of East Africa, where the savannah resembles an off-piste driver training centre, Botswana, and to a lesser extent Zimbabwe, are determined to keep their safari holidays exclusive. And expensive.

To this end, Botswana has divided its wilderness up into gigantic concession areas. If you are a safari company and you hope to win a concession, you have to show commitment to Botswana's prized exclusivity. You want to build a high-rise hotel with a guitar-shaped swimming pool and an open- air night-club? Sorry. You need to demonstrate that you can make a living from erecting a tented camp in an area the size of Luxembourg.

I am not sure whether "tent" has a definition in Bostwanan law. The accommodations during my recent trip to Kings Pool and Little Vumbura were fondly referred to as tents, though they had more in common with luxury villas. Yes, they had canvas walls and net windows. But they also had floors of varnished wood, verandahs, electric ceiling fans, lights and fully functioning en- suite bathrooms. Meanwhile at Matusadona Lodge in Zimbabwe I stayed on a floating lodge on Lake Kariba, access to which was by private canoe. Fair enough of course. If people are paying pounds 200 a night they will expect more than a ground sheet to sleep on.

They will also expect to get their money's worth of wild animals. And this is where conservation comes in. The government of Botswana has learnt that game-viewing goes hand- in-hand with game management. No animals would mean no tourists.

Chris Greathead, who manages the Kings Pool concession by the Linyanti River on the border with Namibia, told me about battles with poachers. "Until 1993 this was a bad area for commercial poaching," he said. "There used to be a lot of black and white rhino here; now they have all been wiped out. The gangs had tricks for evading detection. One group of ivory poachers used to cover their tracks by wearing elephant-feet sandals. But now we have about 30 guys from the Botswana Defence Force patrolling our concession, and there is very little poaching."

Some of the concessions have small populations of people as well as wild animals living on them. In these community concessions, the local villagers form a trust and put the animal-viewing or -hunting rights out to tender themselves (hunting rights are very exclusive and very, very expensive. People like retired generals from the US military will come to Botswana to "Shoot An Elephant"). Preferred bids come from safari companies that provide money for building schools and clinics in the villages, and jobs for local people.

The upshot of the community concession system is that animals - formerly regarded as a danger and a nuisance - are seen by the villagers as their most valuable asset. It would be hard to expect people to care about animal conservation otherwise.

Rumours occasionally spread out of Botswana that the government wants to abandon wildlife and turn the wilderness of the Okavango Delta into a giant cattle ranch instead. The long-term, on-going project of controlling the tsetse fly is feared to be a step in this direction, as are the fences which have been erected to separate cattle from the wild buffalo.

But Chris Greathead told me that these fears were fading. "The authorities in Botswana now are genuinely passionate about wildlife conservation. Controlling the tsetse fly is not necessarily about preparing the ground for cattle. It is something we need to do anyway, to make this environment bearable for tourists. The beef-selling agreement with the EU has been a problem, but that is about to end and I think the fences are going to come down."

From what I could see, the local people would hope so too. The Okavango Delta is the ecological pride and joy of this blessed and exclusive country. Climatically, it should be a desert. But in fact it is kept miraculously watered by the annual flooding of the Okavango River, which is in turn dependent on rains in distant Angola.

The traditional means of getting around the delta has been in a makoro, or dug-out canoe. Today in camps like Little Vumbura, tourists are poled about in fibre-glass versions of the same (which do not require the cutting down of trees). When I arrived I was soon being taken through avenues of tall papyrus, looking for kingfishers, baby crocodiles, technicolour frogs and water snakes. Hacking channels through the reeds and papyrus, once the work of local fishermen, is now done by safari camp owners to provide access for tourists.

My local guide, named Pray, turned out to be involved in running the community concession in which Little Vumbura was located. He spoke near- perfect English; listening to him I felt like I was looking through a window to another age of mankind. Today he discusses putting safari-rights out to tender but until he was 10 years old he had never encountered an industrially manufactured product. For clothes he wore an animal-skin loin-cloth. When he was ill he chewed the leaves of the fever tree. His house was made from common reeds, his baskets and mats of papyrus fibres were dyed purple and orange and brown using the roots and bark of the magic gaari tree. All he knew, he told me, were things he could pick up around him.

Standing in the back of my makoro, he gestured at the vegetation around us. Anyone for lunch? Blue water lilies on the water surface hid edible pods like artichokes underneath. On dry land, the African ebony tree produced edible berries. Then there was the marula - an extremely sour citrus fruit, used to ferment into the local hooch. Even the sap of the papyrus, which contains glucose, could be eaten like an ice-cream lolly (I tried it, peeling away the green skin like a banana and chewing on the soft, bland insides which had a texture like an extremely floury apple). Afterwards Pray gave me a twig of the toothbrush tree to chew on.

With such abundance who needed anything else? Pray explained that one day a shopkeeper had come to his village and started selling items

like toothpaste and plastic sandals

and bottled oil, taking for payment not money (there was none) but woven baskets. It had been his first glimpse of the outside world. Twelve years later, he went to school in the city to learn the skills of a professional guide. His tuition fees - inevitably - were paid for by profits made from poaching.

What a fascinating story. So fascinating that I decided I would like to visit Pray's village. Forget game-drives, forget elephants, forget even gin-and-tonics at sunset. I just needed a jeep to get me to the village, three hours' drive away. Was that not possible? Sorry, said the camp manager, but no car was available. He might just as well have reminded me that Botswana was like all exclusive clubs. Tourism has its rules. Visiting the local villages is not what one does.

AFRICA

GETTING THERE

Jeremy Atiyah travelled as a guest of Wildlife Worldwide (tel: 0181-667 9158). A six-night package staying for two nights in each of the luxury safari camps of Matusadona, Kings Pool and Little Vumbura costs from pounds 2,295 per person, including return flights, full board and all alcoholic drinks.

The jumping off points for safari holidays in either Botswana and Zimbabwe are usually Maun or Victoria Falls, generally via Johannesburg. Return flights to Victoria Falls via Madrid on Iberia cost pounds 568 including tax. Call Trailfinders (tel: 0171-938 3939).

JAMES GALWAY

The world-renowned flautist hates queueing, performing in South America and French bureaucracy. On the other hand, there are always New York delis and Manchester United...

INTERVIEW BY JEREMY ATIYAH

SUNDAY 09 MAY 1999

When it comes to travel, I've got one important piece of advice for everyone. Just make sure you've got a book in your pocket at all times. Then you needn't waste a single minute in all those queues. You read a couple more pages while you're kicking you bag along.

I tour for about eight months of the year then have the rest of the year free to water my garden in Switzerland. When I'm touring, I just fly from one place to the next - arrive, practise, perform. That's not as boring as it sounds though, because I have a lot of old friends everywhere. Travelling with the orchestra is more fun because you get to stay a bit longer in each place.

When I get to Ireland, of course, it's like the prodigal son coming home. Everybody knows me. But in New York it's almost the same. Last time I was there I went into one of those great Jewish delis and asked for a coffee. "I'll have a kiss, Mr Galway, for that," said the woman.

There are plenty of places round the world where people recognise me but New York is the place where I've got the most mothers. Boston, by the way, has a totally different feel. There, it's much more of a university crowd.

I've never had any travel nightmares, but occasionally I've had to travel without my passport. Once I was flying to Holland from Switzerland and the Swiss police wanted to know how I planned to get through Dutch immigration without any ID. So I took out a couple of my own CDs from my suitcase to show him. "But wait a minute," the policeman objected, "anybody could get these made up." "Maybe," I replied, "but not anybody could play them." And I was all ready to get my flute out for a demonstration. They decided to let me through.

Once I got to Holland the Dutch gave me a piece of paper as a substitute passport, which I was told I would have to surrender when leaving the country. This I eventually did, in some customs shed on the border with Germany at 6am one morning. There were these four Dutch border-police playing cards in the shed. I walked in and showed them my piece of paper. They were fascinated. "Where d'you get this?" they asked. "We've never seen one of these before." I had to resort to my trick with the CDs again.

Places that I enjoy travelling to? Japan is always a good place to visit. My wife and I went to have tea with the Empress on our last trip. She speaks English extremely well. 

"Do you mind if I call you Jeannie?" she asked my wife. They were having a whale of time together. Later we played together, the empress on the piano and me on the flute.

Believe it or not, Manchester is the other place I like, and that's not just because my brother lives there. I recently did a charity concert there with my old friend, the composer Phil Coulter. I've sometimes done work for a few badly run Irish charities but this was great: we raised pounds 35,000 in a single night, to build an annex for a home dedicated to caring for terminally ill children. Phil has never got paid for any concert he's done with me, though I did take him to a Manchester United match afterwards.

There are some places I don't like going to. I don't go to South America anymore for example, where they have a nasty habit of cancelling concerts at the last minute which you had agreed to take part in two years before. When that happens it ruins your schedule. Basically, I won't tour south of the Suez Canal unless I get paid fully in advance!

I don't like travelling to France either. This is the country that murdered two Greenpeace activists and got away with it. And anyway you can't plan a holiday in France without having to take the possibility of strikes into account. I was once flying out of Paris and found a mile-long queue at customs. There was a single guy on duty reading every page of every person's passport.

I finally got through to find that the late Lord Menuhin was down there, too. He had switched flights because his first flight was delayed, but then ended up watching the original flight leave earlier anyway. Another time, I had a fully paid-up ticket for a Concorde flight out of Paris and still missed the flight because the airport computer systems weren't working. You may think that these things are all part of the charm of France, but I don't.

I've been living in a little village outside Lucerne in Switzerland for the past 23 years. We live in Switzerland because my wife is Swiss, but wherever you live, you pay for what you get. In Switzerland everything works and nobody goes on strike.

Ours is a lovely village. I've got three professional fishermen and one professional farmer living in my street, and then there's the Russian pianist and conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy just round the corner. It takes me two hours to water my garden. What more could I ask for?

James Galway is starting a 60th-birthday nationwide tour of the UK on 12 May. He is also performing on 30 June at the City of London Festival with the London Mozart Players at the Guildhall (tel: 0171-638 8891).

Calling all tomb-sweepers

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

JEREMY ATIYAH 

Sunday, 2 May 1999

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Memories of a land

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

JEREMY ATIYAH

 SUNDAY 25 APRIL 1999

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just hop on the bus to Kashgar

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

Jeremy Atiyah 

Sunday, 25 April 1999

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

KARAKORAM HIGHWAY

GETTING THERE

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

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

VISAS

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

Stay a while in Stalin country

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

Jeremy Atiyah 

Sunday, 11 April 1999

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GETTING THERE

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

PACKAGES

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

VISAS

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