Notes on Caucasian experiences and Central Asia at last

Notes on Caucasian experiences and Central Asia at last

Georgia

Tbilisi

The Log Inn Hotel (almost impossible to believe but not so unusual in this part of the world), is up a quiet unmade road off one of the major traffic arteries following the right bank of the Mtkvari River in Tbilisi, capital of Georgia.  The flow of Georgia’s longest river from Vardzia into Azerbaijan is hardly more relentless than the flow of traffic beside its banks, such that crossing the road appeared so impossible that we hailed a passing pair of traffic police to escort us to the other side.  They are clearly tolerant of tourist incompetence and treated us kindly as they stepped into the road and stopped the traffic dead.  We did shortly discover networks of subways and underpasses but rarely exactly where it was most convenient in our eyes.  Safely on the embankment we walked downriver to the Peace Bridge, one of many building and restoration works inspired by Mikheil Saakashvili, the reforming former President of Georgian and leader of the Rose Revolution.  His career, ending in present stateless ignominy in Holland with his Dutch wife, deserves at the least a quick scan of his Wikipedia entry and opinion of him in Georgia itself is highly divided.

Across the bridge we were in the old town of Tbilisi where small alleys run between swayed wooden and brick houses with carved balconies jutting overhead.  They open into wider thoroughfares, once filled with artisans’ shops, taken over now by restaurants, any number of karaoke bars and irresistible local designers shops selling clothes and jewellery.  Highly desirable jewellery too for a lover of hefty pieces of inventive and unusual design, set with rough cut chunks of gemstones or remarkably beautiful enamel work.  Clothes are mixed, boiled felts used for garments from slippers to shawls vary from rough and ready to a rare softness, mix with spectacular embellished leather pieces and fleece hats begging to be tried on. 

Passing by these honey traps with difficulty, the first church visit was to the Sioni Cathedral.  Built on the typical Georgian orthodox model, its austere brick exterior belies the painted wealth within, where dignified icons mix madly with arches garlanded like Victorian chintz.  It is clear that the churches are very much living and breathing centres of the community as black robed priests come and go and individuals drop in during the working day for a quiet prayer or hopeful supplication sent forth with the light of a candle lit in front of a favourite icon. Here too is Queen Ketevan, the first sighting of one of the excuses for this trip to Georgia, portrayed looking calm, beautiful and a great many years younger than when she was finally martyred by Shah Abbas after years of captivity in Persia.  (see text box)

Ketevan’s husband, King David, inherited when his father abdicated in favour of the monastic life but died shortly thereafter whereupon his Father returned to the throne. Constantine then rode in to engage in dramatic fratricide and patricide at the behest of his patron, sending his father’s and remaining brother’s heads back to Shah Abb

as before being himself defeated and killed in battle by an army of Kakhetian nobles whereupon Ketevan became regent for her eldest son Teimuraz petitioning the Shah to recognise him as the rightful ruler.  In the simplest version of the ongoing story, in 1614, Ketevan herself travelled to the court of the Shah and remained a hostage in Shiraz against any trouble from Teimuraz on the borders that would result in a Persian invasion of Kakheti.  In fact Teimuraz and his neighbouring ruler in the kingdom of Kartli did not play the game, resulting in the invasion of Georgia and sacking of Tbilisi by the Shah during 4 campaigns between 1614 -1617 and huge deportations of Georgians to Persia.  Teimuraz took refuge in the kingdom of Imereti from where he continue to be a thorn in the Persian side.  His two sons were taken into captivity initially with their Grandmother. After five years they were removed and castrated, one dying and one going mad as a result.  Ketevan no knowing her grandsons’ fate remained a prisoner for another five years, following an extremely ascetic and spiritual regime under the immediate care of Imam Quli-Khan Undiladze, the ruler of south eastern Persia, an ethnic Georgian who regarded her with immense respect.

It is not hard to imagine that the saintly queen may have become a dangerous focal point for the influx of Georgian deportees into Persia, let alone her son continued actively to resist the Shah.  In 1624 Abbas demanded Ketevan’s renunciation of Christianity and conversion to Islam on pain of death by torture.  He may possibly have required her further to join his harem, presumably as the ultimate humiliation given their relative ages, he over fifty and she 64. Urged by Imam Quli-Khan to acquiesce rather than suffer a dreadful death, Ketevan unsurprisingly, given the ways of the martyrs, refused. She was forced to suffer agonising torture with red- hot pincers, detailed descriptions are readily available, until it is said, her soul blessedly departed after her forehead was split with a red-hot spade. Her martyrdom was witnessed by missionaries of the St Augustine Portuguese Catholic order in Goa who removed the body, partly to be interred in the Alaverdi Monastery in Georgia and partly within the St Augustine convent in Goa.  They were finally rediscovered under the ruins in Old Goa in 2004, after a long search based on old Portuguese sources, by a joint team of the Archaeological Survey of India and Portuguese archaeologists.  After DNA testing the muddle of bones in a stone urn were proved in 2013 to include those of 2 known European missionaries of the correct period and a Georgian woman.

The oldest surviving church in Tbilisi is the Anchiskhati Basilica, named for a famous icon now securely held by the Fine Arts Museum.  It is on the same high domes, 3 nave basilica plan that will become increasingly familiar to any traveller in this part of the world and dates back to the 6^th century.  The blackened frescoes of a later date nevertheless emphasise the great antiquity of their surroundings.  (Ancient churches did not all suffer from the determined and often excessive restorations of President Saakashvili’s modernising rule that brought condemnation from international, cultural organisations in the case of Bagrati Cathedral, Kutaisi which we will come to later.  His fast infrastructure development and initiatives to reduce rural poverty, increase and support populations in difficult mountain areas with new initiatives including facilities for tourism, should be seen as valuable and important. but have not been uniformly popular.  To the outsider they would seem part and parcel of the intense Georgian patriotism and national pride but change since Soviet days has already been too fast in many instances for the population of this factional and highly traditional country – whatever that tradition might have been.

21^st century all too standard luxury is on show in Freedom Square.  The stalls selling chuchkela, very traditional snacks of nuts wrapped in different fruit pastes, boiled down until it acquires a waxy consistency, and looking like lumpy salamis hanging from their strings, fringe the pavements of the square where a blindingly gold statue of St George and his dragon stand on the central high column once occupied by Lenin.  A classical building that looks like a museum, instead houses a large Burberry, the Museum of Georgian History is a little way away on the major artery, Rustaveli. The temporary exhibition at that moment was an extraordinarily designed exhibition of dozens of skulls, the earliest ever found up to a very obvious Homo Sapiens and dozens of others from all over the world, all on stands at touchable height.  It looked like an unexpected art installation far more than an exhibition of anthropological exploration and was oddly beautiful.  Permanent exhibitions here include a remarkable trove of gold jewellery, some pieces dating back to the 6^th century and many set with stones, particularly carnelian, garnet and agates. To 21^st century eyes, it all appeared of remarkably contemporary design and skillset.

It is easy to keep walking in Tbilisi, drawn on as in so many cities, by the next monument, an idiosyncratic museum, a local curiosity, the dome of a church or a pretty tree-lined street with interesting shops and cafes.  It was surprisingly hot for May and we, quite mistakenly, tried to find a taxi to get back to the Log Inn.  It cost nothing and the distance in the end was small but we clearly should have walked had a sleepless night of stop start flights not begun to tell in sore feet and aching knees. Tbilisi taxi drivers do not do The Knowledge and before we started and, by successfully following our own noses along the river, arrived, we had a conference with about 10 drivers involving all our tourist maps which were apparently completely incomprehensible to them.  In fact the next taxi we had, organised from the hotel also got lost and we arrived half an hour late for evening prayers in the Peace Cathedral of the Evangelical Baptist Church of Georgia.

The Evangelical Baptists bear no relation to Baptists, least of all the American Baptists usually to be found evangelising in poor tribal areas of the world.  Their militant missionaries have succeeded, over the past 100 years or so, in wiping all signs of local culture off the map that might today have brought in valuable tourism.  In North East India for instance, with its once great wealth of unique societies and languages, tourists prepared to brave the terrible roads, get barn like community churches, English language singing and the barest remains of the tribal cultures celebrated by the ‘philanthropologist’ Verrier Elwin.  He started as a missionary too but became far too fascinated by local culture to wish to change it.  The Georgian Baptists, are none of this but rather a very liberal and ecumenical branch of Georgian orthodoxy. The Peace Cathedral, under the auspices of the former archbishop, Malkhaz Songulashvili, is a former prisoner of war dormitory from WWII.  It has been transformed by the addition of a stone apse, looking like the remains of some ancient basilica, a vast square carved sandstone altar and two massive stone pillars.  More is yet to be done; proper seating to replace the motley chairs and benches and the addition of two wings to house a mosque and a synagogue.  Definitely not the usual Baptist form as we know it.

The former archbishop, a highly educated and linguistically gifted academic, has fought with government and the conservative Orthodox church for minority rights all his life and lost his archbishopric recently to a one-time pupil who took a more conservative stance on LGBT rights closer in line to orthodoxy.  The battle is highly political with the extreme anti-gay policies of Russia influencing regions where a conservative and intensely religious population is anyway disposed to dislike ‘difference’ in any form.  According to Malkhaz, the new archbishop’s wife is a ‘cured’ lesbian and is the extreme power behind her husband’s archiepiscopal throne.  We had dinner with Malkhaz and his wife Anna at their wonderful house where a positively bunker like exterior hides a huge library, a painted chapel and antechambers designed for ecumenical prayer, all looking as if they too might have existed since the 6^th century and in fact the house is on very old foundations. Joined by a posse of friendly rescue dogs who lay in every available gap on sofas or chairs, we ate spectacularly fresh Georgian salad, mushroom soup, treacly black rye bread, cheese and pickled red cabbage washed down with enough Georgian wine to send us reeling back to the Log Inn and into the soundest sleep.

To Vardzia

The unfamiliar buffet breakfast is always a bit of an adventure, some more worthwhile than others and the Log Inn’s left a certain amount to be desired in spite of smiling elderly women in bedroom slippers rushing to produce quantities of muddy Turkish coffee and whisk plates and bowls away almost before a spoon or knife has hit the china.  The thick yoghurt was in fact sour cream, yoghurt came in plastic pots as per and there were frankfurters, potato this and that, long-boiled, very hard-boiled eggs, bread, coffee cream stuffed bounceable buns and small slivers of slightly sad fruit.  Georgians are extremely proud of everything that is Georgian as our driver/guide, Gaga, pointed out constantly.  He himself lived to eat, Georgian food is very good indeed in general but high on calories and Gaga’s girth did not encourage much guiding beyond the inside of his car.  He clearly hoped to be left in peace to snooze in his seat while sending his clients off on endless ‘hikes’ which didn’t go too well after the first.  A 4km uphill clamber to a ruined village was alright I suppose but we could have driven to the ruined village at the top if Gaga hadn’t been so worried about the suspension of his car and we had known better than to agree to the plan.

By the time we came back down the hot and dusty 4km, accompanied by a stray dog who attempted, mistakenly we thought, to kill an adder basking on the road, to save us, and who we wept to leave behind, we had learned our lesson.  At the same time, we had our first sight of Georgia’s glorious wildflowers and the village, set in green flower spotted alpine meadows with a long abandoned but still atmospheric and fully roofed church was very attractive.  Sadly there are plenty of villages like this abandoned, or near deserted among the Georgian mountains, not so much due to urban migration as one might expect; on the contrary, urban areas also lost populations in post-Soviet years, but due to migration out of the country, reduced birth-rates and an ageing population, combined with declining agriculture and the difficulties of rural life especially in the bitter Georgian winters. Rural tourism is a vital component in plans to regenerate these areas and grow the Georgian economy.

We had walked up from nearby the ruined fort of Tmvogi on its spectacular rocky perch and stayed that night in the nearby Tirebi guest house where everything from beef to beans and cheese to jam, had been grown or made by the local farming family who had diversified into hospitality and expanded recently into a purpose-built guest house.  They will need to improve the home-made wine or dilute the currency with something made elsewhere if they are to attract the great drinking public. To get there we drove from Tbilisi through dreary villages of tin and corrugated roofed houses or serried ranks of government built basic dwelling for the refugees of the most recent of many small wars in South Ossetia when it was lost to the Russians as part of their clawing back of Caucasian territories.

The landscape was a different matter as we drove through green meadows and mixed forested hillsides, the verges covered with dog roses and other wild spring flowers and the Lesser Caucasus, snowy peaks on our right, away to the North, en route for the 5^th century Atskuri fort, one of the oldest in the country from the time when Christianity was first brought to Georgia by St Andrea.  It has been destroyed by countless invaders and rebuilt time after time but has not suffered the Disneyfication of the Rabati fortress in Akhaltsicke, a rather dreary town alleviated only by its red-tiled roofs.  This is on Saakahsvili inspired renovation that has gone a long way too far, an amenity for local tourism maybe but with all cultural or historical value as destroyed as the headhunting societies of Nagaland.

In the increasingly dramatic and craggy countryside there are fewer birds than one might hope, ubiquitous summer swallows, the odd unidentifiable small brown, a few European rollers or sunbirds in groups brightly decorating overhead wires and hooded crows on rocky hillsides.  In the hurtling rivers, fish stocks have been seriously depleted by overfishing using electric shocks.  Shooting is seasonal, most animals are protected but there are duck in season and some ground game.  Wolf shooting, usually by farmers protecting their stock, requires a special licence.  Gaga is, he says, a keen hunter with a 5 shot repeating 12 bore.  I’m surprised he could waddle far enough to shoot anything given his intense relationship with food which will become apparent to anyone reading yet another description of lunch or dinner in this account.  Lunch on this occasion was in the outdoor tented ‘pavilions’ of the Edemi restaurant, an adjunct to a trout farm.

On through terraced vineyards and poppy spotted fields and a turn uphill to the comfortable looking buildings of the Sapara monastery and an old ruined nunnery in a village high above the river valley. Here the depopulation and difficulties of subsistence farming were apparent however slowed by Saakashvilian policies to incentivise hard rural lives by provision of 4WD vehicles, free electricity and communication infrastructure.  The nunnery had once been part of another fort, unbreachable on 3 sides on its jutting cliff edge and built of such vast stones, it is almost impossible to imagine anyone building it, let alone attempting to invade.

In Vardzia itself we walked through the honeycomb megalithic cave complex carved into the hillside high above the river.  The famous Queen Tamar who established the monastery and ruled from here for a period of her ‘golden age’ reign in the 12^th century is represented in a fresco in the painted rock church considered the highlight of the complex. The frescoes in general have been sadly blackened by age and a recent fire but it is a highly atmospheric place where we scrambled up steep stairs to the asylum or refuge and down even steeper stairs behind a number of hefty black clad women puffing their way down to get back into the outside air at the front of the cliff face and made our way down to the tourist shops at the bottom.  Restored by improbably delicious water melon slice shaped icecreams on sticks, we drove back to the Tirebi to enjoy unlimited hot water in its inky dark bathrooms and the continuing hospitality of Marina, 46 and looking twenty years older, her husband and son, Giorgi, named as is the general rule we were told, for his grandfather. 

 Passing swiftly over the semolina with cheese and butter for breakfast we tool a longish drive via Borjomi where, carried away by an unusually co-operative ATM, I cashed unnecessary amounts of Lari, and on to Kutaisi, Georgia’s second and Gaga’s home city. As we drive, crops change from region to region with food specialities and the habits of what were once separate kingdoms with different languages and local habits. Fruit grows abundantly and there are cherry and walnut trees, citrus and, we are assured, everything except bananas – exaggerations based on national pride are also part of the landscape.  Brown cattle graze, fewer sheep, endless magpies but Gaga cannot name a single bird or plant.  There is honey for sale on the roadside and, later, terracotta ovens and wine amphorae of antique design and beauty, wooden and wicker this and that, hammocks, fresh strawberries and preserved or pickled fruit and vegetables in jars. 

Kutaisi is in many ways like a French provincial town, with municipal buildings and the distraction of a large modernistic animal covered sculpted fountain in the main square, wide tree lined streets, a Macdonalds and a phenomenal indoor market. The Sunday market was described by Madame Carla Serena in the 1870s as a ‘animated: sellers, buyers, swarming beggars in a relatively restricted space, where on the muddy ground are displayed all the products of the country’.  Not too many of the beggars to be seen as I employed my best Russian to haggle for spices with the older Russian speaking generation, but we gazed fascinated at one after another face of a vendor somehow evolved to resemble his or her own wares; so the walnut seller had a crinkled brown walnut face, the flour sellers had grown white; the spice sellers as animated as the ‘Georgian spices’ mix we tried.  We regretted all that dried garlic for the rest of the day. We ate nazuki, grape and honey bread from a regional bakery – delicious but not the ideal elevenses before a lunch that involved famous khinkali, quadruple sized Shanghai style dumplings full of minced meat and broth that must be sucked out with the first bite or sometimes with cheese, mushroom or beetroot.  They were followed by mkhali, what I would describe as veg splats – minced aubergine, bean, young beet leaves and mysterious ‘Georgian spices’ that included, most identifiably, garlic and chilli.

The Bagrati Cathedral may have been Saakashvili’s nemesis in terms of new architecture but we were astonished by the clever and beautifully done renovation.  The new green roof might be a little bright for some years to come but the beautifully done interior, unrepainted and with steel columns and glass were bound to appeal to austere Northern eyes and visitors might or might not enjoy the war dance of the proprietorial dove living in the vestry that attacks intruders’ feet.  Gaga made it clear as a determined orthodox traditionalist and nationalist that he would rather have kept the cathedral as a ruin, presumably because that was more traditional than a usable church.  He perhaps took traditionalism too far but he did make us understand what Malkhaz Songulashvili might be up against. This was a man whose wife had to call him if she was going out of the house and was not allowed to work despite her pharmacist training.  Gaga was only the first of several of his hidebound ilk during this journey, who took extreme pride in ‘tradition’ involving chauvinism at a level unacceptable to most and a view of women, their wives in particular, that made my blood boil.  Christian ‘tradition’ or Muslim made no difference and neither, one suspected, had 70 years of communism, on the contrary traditional Russian rather than soviet attitudes seem likely to have endorsed those in their satellites both to women and to their LGBT communities.

 The Gelati monastery at Kutaisi, 9 versts from the town in Mme Serena’s time, also under restoration but of a less radical variety, is one of the great sites of Georgian orthodoxy.  Founded by the splendidly named David the Builder, David IV, one of the greatest Georgian kings, in 1106 and the place of his burial and that of other sovereigns including Queen Tamar. It is crammed with glorious mosaics and with frescoes, reminiscent in some case of those in Ethiopian churches with their depictions of the most fanciful and enjoyable religious stories and fables, and, like Mtsketa, has its own legend of the Shroud of Christ albeit this one bore the image of the Virgin after she had pressed her face against the cloth.  St Andrew, travelling to the Caucasus after Christ’s death is said to have used the touch of the shroud to raise the local Queen’s recently deceased son from the dead after a sort of prayer duel with the pagan priests of the place and their idols.

Heading for Kazbegi and towards the Russian border on the Georgian Military Highway we had lunch, looking at these notes, lunches seemed to come thick and fast with Gaga as guide and they were rarely small.  On this occasion we ate a hot dish of meat in a vaguely curried walnut sauce and salmon in a slightly different cold walnut sauce, both called either bazha or satsivi – walnut sauces and walnuts in general are an important element in Georgian cooking;  rolls of a mozzarella like cheese, flavoured with mint, gebzhalia, a delicious speciality of the Mingrelia region; all with the usual irresistible Georgian flat bread.  Gaga could not drink while he was with us and driving and although he regularly mentioned his own winemaking expertise, many people in Georgia make their own, his advice in restaurants was either unreliable or he liked something akin to Ribena.  We had no idea how delicious Georgian wine really was, regardless of its reputation as god’s own vineyard with the most ancient method of winemaking still in use, until we reached the Kakhetia wine growing region where Queen Ketevan had once held power and went wine tasting.

On the way to Kazbegi and into the Caucasus and the Mtskheta-Mtianeti region, we drove between friable looking sandstone cliffs and paused on a wind gusted headland to examine shaggy sheepskin hats, local honey and beeswax products on semi-deserted tourist stall overlooking the spectacular Zhinvalii reservoir.  Likewise overlooking the reservoir on a glorious site, the restored 17^th and 18^th Ananuri fortress and its two churches retains some splendid frescoes and stonework. Here and there antique towers stand on the hillsides above the dry riverbed and the gravel lorries collecting their loads below and, uphill, where the river revives to tumble new stones and gravel downstream and jutting snowy peaks in the distance, there is a tiny white church, beehives and more stalls selling honey at the roadsides.  The weather deteriorates as we drive through steep green pastures and a ski resort, grimy and grey as the last patches of snow hang on in dirt flecked patches.

Kazbegi, or Stepanstminda by its restored old Georgian name, the backdrop of its great eponymous mountain glimpsed through the clouds as we arrive, had an equally grimy and depressed, frontier town feel.  In bright sun it might be better but the lilac filled spring gardens do little to distract from mean little houses and the air of one-horse town shuttered gloom.  Rusty gas pipes running above head height down the sides of streets and alleys, we discover they are a standard feature of badly planned Georgian settlements and villages like this one, add nothing to the scenery as the weather closes in.  We stayed, and froze, in the Iro & Dato guesthouse with gubby flocked sheets and tiny, icy bathrooms BUT, In Georgia there is always hot water, reliable electricity and remarkably good connectivity even in valleys and among the mountains and there is always the food.  The guesthouse, primed no doubt by Gaga, produced a spectacular amount for its sole 3 guests, served at a vast kitchen table and including a sort of minced meat torpedo rissole which was astonishingly good and may owe more to Russian than Georgia in this frontier area.

In the morning, driving up the track towards the Gergeti Trinity Church, one of the staple images of Georgian tourism with the sunlit mountain behind it, both were indiscernible in the thick cloud and chilly drizzle.   The cars gave up on the rutty track and after a short but stiff climb we arrived at the church packed with mainly German hikers.  Properly covered as the guardians of orthodoxy demand, with head coverings and the long kilt-like aprons required of women in trousers, the truth was the interior had nothing out of the way to offer – the point was the invisible setting and the equally invisible view.  Heading once again down from the mountains we had planned to drive and walk in the Truso valley but were put off by driving rain that made the deserted villages miserable, drenched grazing flocks, guarded by dogs against marauding wolves and discouraged further exploration of the mountain flowers, yellow and white azaleas and rhododendrons with primulas and other small flowers.  The Choughs rising and falling on the wind were the most positive signs of life and the Friendship Monument, a stone, concrete and painted rampart high above the Military Road, a symbol of the undying friendship between Georgia and Russia, in 1983 at any rate, added nothing to the scenery on a cold, wet day.

We reached Mtsketa too in pouring rain, not ideal but the glorious ancient Svetitskhoveli cathedral, baptism and burial place of Georgian kings and believed repository of the Shroud among its many other relics, is hardly diminished by bad weather regardless of layers of restoration.  The mediaeval monuments of Mtsketa are a UNESCO World Heritage Site and most recent Saakashvili inspired remodelling in the town does not jar so far as can be seen in the rain – possibly the arcade of tourist shops may have part of modernisations but mammon stays close to the sacred where there is ready custom.  The cathedral was full with more worshippers than tourists in one of the most sacred sites of Christendom, the 13^th/14^th century copy of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem symbolising its important role as the site of the holy Shroud.   

Legend has it that Georgian Jew from Mtskheta named Elias was in Jerusalem when Jesus was crucified. Elias bought Jesus' robe from a Roman soldier at Golgotha and brought it back to Georgia. Upon his return to his native city, he was met by his sister Sidonia who upon touching the robe immediately died from the emotions engendered by the holy object. The robe could not be removed from her grasp, so she was buried with it, her grave is now inside the cathedral.  Later a huge cedar tree grew form her grave which St Nino, the woman responsible for the Christianisation of Georgia in the 4^th century, ordered chopped down to make seven columns for a church. The seventh column floated in the air until St Nino prayed all night and the column descended to become a miracle making part of the church.

St Nino we will come to later at her major shrine at Bodbe, meanwhile we headed uphill to the atmospheric 6^th century Jvari monastery, high above the town before, as the light failed, on a horrible day, forgoing the remaining great monuments of Mtsketa and returning for the night to Tbilisi.  Hard to get away from yet more food but a very un-Georgian dinner involving caipirinhas, good dry red wine and chicken salad was clearly worthy of comment in my notes from that evening for its delightful novelty.

I do detest unimaginative guides or set in their ways drivers.  Gaga could not bear deviations from an itinerary that was more in his head than a confirmed plan. The ‘let’s go and see what that tower is’, moment put him severely out of sorts.  So much for pride in country and all its treasures but, as already said, he saw those most clearly through the eyes of a glutton.  His boss, Davit Berishvili, once himself an enthusiastic guide and now, to his regret tied to a desk running his travel business considered too much good living and not enough exercise detrimental to the calling.  He, in contrast, took us in double quick time to several of the major sights of old Tbilisi including the famous hot spring baths when we had only met him for a cup of coffee. 

Gaga, notwithstanding requests for diversions, was happier as we drove towards wine growing Kakhetia in the rain the following day with wine tastings and more good food in his sights.  Gloomy little boxy soviet style villages on the route were always brightened by apron gardens with ubiquitous yuccas and surrounding meadows of Michaelmas daisies and masses of wild flowering shrubs. On the lower slopes of deciduous forested hillsides, the trees gave way to yellow broom and valerian growing from tumbled walls and stones fringing the road.  Black headscarfed women ignore minimal road traffic and their crone like elder comes out of her house, leaning on a stick, to feed her hens, gripping a small child tightly with her spare hand.  Beehives cluster on flat bed trailers in hillside laybys, movable production lines taking advantage of spring in the mountains and the hills up near the Komburi pass are green down covered, lingering shreds of cloud hanging between them.  There are teazels more villages, iron and wood balconies and verandahs on houses, the head height gas pipes in various colours running through them and all rusting or gently rotting in the damp air in these de-populated highlands.  Going downhill towards the River Turdo we drive through a tunnel of trees and woods where wild mushrooms grow and out onto the vine covered plain, rich land protected by the hills we have left and the reef of the Greater Caucasus ahead.

 The Alaverdi monastery, the highest, or perhaps tallest is the right word, in Georgia until the opening of the massive Sameba in Tbilisi in 2004, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is easily seen from the distance on the flat land. The vast and imposing interior is almost bare now of decoration, a fresco of St George and the dragon inside the portico, the best preserved of the remaining fragments of 15^th and 16^th century frescoes.  We were lucky to have the monumental space to ourselves barring a couple of priests and were exploring the graveyard where members of the Kakhetian royal family and nobles were buried, by the time a bus load of other tourists arrived.  The Bishop’s palace was once the house of the Persian governor in the days of Shah Abbas and there was some question of a grave of Queen Ketevan here or presumably of parts of her body not interred in Goa. The Alaverdi monks in this wine focused area make their own famous wine plus excellent yoghurt which we tried as ice cream in an immaculate new café opposite the church.

The Kakhetia region feels quite different to other parts of the country, fat, comfortable and relatively wealthier.  There is tourism development across the country although the Kazbegi area looks ripe for more and Kakhetia, with its famous wineries now providing sophisticated wine tasting sessions, restaurants and hotels, is beginning to take on a Napa Valley air of prosperity.  Carla Serena described it as ‘the paradise of the Georgian topers’. The small town of Telavi, the former capital, close to Alaverdi, retains what appears to be a basic rural economy with its daily early morning market; smallholders selling surplus; small traders and sale and barter.  There are huge plane trees everywhere including one believably reputed to be 900 years old.  Out of town, chestnut lined roads lead to the Greater Caucasus and Chechnya and the land looks like Richmond park with oaks, chestnuts and then poplars by the River Alazani where flocks cover the river plain.

We visit the Chavchavadze Palace at Tsinandali, the summer country house of Prince Alexander Chavchavadze who was born in St Petersburg to the son of Kakheti-Kartli’s ambassador, and becoming a lieutenant-general in the Russian army before joining Georgian rebellions against Russian rule. He was a romantic poet, linguist, litterateur and proponent of the ideas of the Enlightenment in Georgia.  In this land of serial conquests, the palace was destroyed in 1854 by Dagestan tribesmen who kidnapped 23 women and children and the prince was bankrupted paying their ransoms.  The ruined palace passing to Tsar Alexander III of Russia and has been restored charmingly in 19^th century style with English style gardens, magnolias, gingkos and a green canopy of venerable old trees. The sense of the time capsule was completed by a mysterious but distinguished man about in the grounds with all the presence of the prince who, it was easy to guess, may have been his forebear.  He was certainly different to the usual smallish, squarish, dark haired and browed Georgian standard.

We were defeated at the busy Gremi monastery on its rocky hill by the numbers of mostly local tourists and disappointed by the level of reconstruction and uninspiring museum.  More cheerfully as the morning wore on we headed for vineyard wine-tastings and, at the Kindzmarauli winery, saw the extraordinary processes of the quervi traditional wine making method using massive clay amphorae buried in the ground – veritably suited to fit Ali Baba and all 40 thieves in a mere handful of these spacious vessels.  We tasted dry whites, delicious reds and a disgusting rose redolent of perished rubber in the cave of the Khareba winery and ate lunch high above on the terrace of its excellent restaurant overlooking miles of vineyards and where we managed to avoid Gaga’s idea of a proper Georgian lunch as opposed to our own.  Below us on the country roads, horses and carts moved with dogs by the wheels and the vines grew in their comforting ranks, roses blooming to mark the ends of lines. 

Back on the road, magpies perpetuate and must be saluted, spectacular yellow and black thrushes flashing across the road and into woods redolent with birdsong and the smell of damp leaves as we head deeper to hidden away Zegaan monastery.  Here, a heavy program of renovation is in hand and muscular young priests were attempting to shift a hefty generator from a lorry into some part of the complex. Back on the main road, we followed a dry river bed among antique workhorse Ladas and occasional BMWs into the restored and very empty town walled town of Sighnaghi on its hilltop overlooking the Great Caucasus and the plain below, as the temperature drops in view of the snow-covered mountain peaks.  The Central guest house is icy and we eat in a gale, wrapped in the blankets provided, at a restaurant at the top of the hill, chacha, a broth of mutton and masses of tarragon; and eggplant and mutton with potato, in spiced tomato, cooked in a clay pot. We drank chacha, the local slivovitz like spirit distilled in the wineries and best drunk quickly to avoid more taste than necessary.

Early the following morning I walked through the more or less deserted town, Georgians are not early risers and this town, intended in its renovated state to be a major tourist attraction is barely beginning to stir by 8.30.  Carla Serena described it as ‘a sad place’ inside its ‘wall, bristling with towers’, where the club was not well attended and the ‘ladies do not come there, as they do in other parts of the Caucasus, to have card parties and smoke’. In the main square, as I walked by, there was one man and a stray dog and, among the trees uphill, a few well-padded, cross looking women setting up stalls to sell chuchela, shaggy sheepskin hats, coarse hand-knit socks and a selection of rather misshapen articles of clothing in rough boiled felt.  There was one bakery open selling chebureki, a sort of cheese turnover of presumably Turkish origin and an old woman redistributing street dust with a broom like a small bush on a stick. Walking the old walls was a mixed pleasure of steps and dead ends and the greatest reward in the town this spring morning was the church topped with a spire where a real herbaceous border of spring flowers somehow grew merrily on the tiles.

It is no wonder invaders wanted the rich and desirable territory of Kakhetia and we pass Chailuri fortress one of many small square hilltop forts all over the country and in particular along the border areas on lines of conquest from Central Asia, Persia and Russia. There are wineries on both sides of the road and wild flowers, delphiniums, cottony thistles and mimosa along its edges and spreading across the land.  At Bodbe convent, St Nino is buried in a small chapel heavily decorated in European baroque style. In the main body of the church, 18^th and 19^th century frescoes show images of her life and of Christ’s.  Unfortunately, no photographs can be taken inside but the wonderful, if slightly municipal, gardens surrounding the chapel and the remarkable new and not yet finished church, paid for mainly by emigrant remittances, give way at a lower level to a splendid vegetable garden, fed by St Nino’s original spring. Carla Serena noted the ruined cloister of her day was beginning, ‘little by little, to lose its prestige.’ Today  she would find it astonishingly revived.

St Nino’s story varies in different traditions but she is most generally believed to have been the daughter of a Roman family in Cappadoccia, possibly a relative of St George and whose uncle was Patriarch of Jerusalem.  She was brought up a Christian and after a visitation by the Virgin Mary, who gave her a cross made of vine wood, travelled with a community of virgins to spread the gospel in what was then known as Iberia.  Unlike her fellows, avoiding martyrdom at the hands of the Armenian king, she reached Iberia/Georgia and, after curing Queen Nana at Mtsketa, of an illness, converted her and, with greater difficulty, in due course her husband, King Mirian, to Christianity.  King Mirian sent ambassadors to Constantine the Great in Byzantium and was duly granted church land in Jerusalem and a delegation of bishops to Iberia where Christianity became the state religion. When Nino died soon after at Bodbe, Mirian commissioned the monastery.

Travelling towards the rock-hewn monastery of Davit Gareja we drive through villages where chuchela, hanging bunched on endless roadside stalls, is the speciality.  There are wild delphiniums, cottony thistles and mimosa and herds of cattle as we reach an increasingly lunar desert landscape, still, at this time of year, covered with flowers.  There was forest here once, cut for iron smelting during the 1^st millennium and iron ore is apparent in the red surfaced hills, free of grass, as we approach Davit Gareja.  The monastery was founded by Davit, one of 13 Assyrian fathers, in the 6^th century and was highly important to Georgian royal and noble families.  The monastery is much damaged but remains a spectacular site if you can face the scramble to reach it which seemed, so far as I was concerned, highly unlikely during the climb up slippery shale and mud slopes.  The caves with their remaining frescoes are reached along a narrow path where handrails are now reduced to a few iron posts, the drop only mitigated by the heavy vegetation of spring.  There are reputed to be snakes, fear of which, Gaga claimed, made him quite unable to attempt the climb.  It seemed highly unlikely any snake would show its head in so highly touristed an area, where busloads of visitors were being disgorged in the parking area below to tramp around the area although we found one shed snakeskin on the way down.

 The Lavra monastery complex low on the hillsides was under heavy restoration and may have been the most interesting part.  High above we teetered along the path, peering into caves and eventually hauled ourselves up over the lip of the cliff to a chapel where border guards patrolled from the nearby military base.  To our relief the downward path, upward too had we known what we were in for, sloped easily and relatively smoothly downhill through phenomenal wildflower meadows, buzzing with insect life.  We returned to Tbilisi on an unexpected route, possibly on an old military road through what appeared to be a former soviet collective farm in time for dinner in the tourist/party hall, a barn of a place where we watched an exhibition of spectacularly athletic and balletic Georgian dancing that seemed of far higher quality than might be expected of the usual tourist entertainment. Carla Serena described her experience of Georgian dance when the ‘Caucasian, armed from head to foot, springs towards the woman of his choice’, and ‘leads her into an amorous swirling, rapid and graceful at the same time, in which the cavalier does all he can to capture the admiration of his partner’, and these dancers certainly caught ours.

Final destinations in Tbilisi were the outdoor ethnographic museum with its rebuilt traditional wooden village houses and workshops from all over the country – not so far removed in fact, barring only their decorative elements, from the dusty boxes of today. One of the most curious traditional objects on show and seen elsewhere too in Central Asia and the Caucasus, was the baby’s cradle, its proper use and practical value demonstrated by an unusually enthusiastic guide. And described by Carla Serena 150 years ago.  It is called an arkvani and ‘is formed from two planks held at the head by a full panel. It is provided with a pillow, a mattress and a wadded coverlet which as an opening around the baby’s neck, leaving the shoulders free.  In the middle of the mattress, a little round hole is made, into which a reed, twenty-five centimetres long, is inserted, whose upper end is cut in a different manner accord to the sex of the child…….’ Rods attached on both sides by means of cloth bands control the wrigglings of the captive, without constraining the development of his or her limbs.  In this country, they attribute to this system of cradling, the beautiful conformation of the race and the almost complete absence of deformities’! Last of all for Sunday shopping, the famous Dry Bridge Market is, on the day we visited, a damp stall upon stall of second- hand, mostly soviet era junk followed by a fruitless search through the shops in the old town and the Prospero book store for a bird book for the Caucasus and Central Asia.  Then onwards and eastwards to the station for the night train to Baku.

Oh Calcutta!

Oh, I do love visiting Calcutta, this time to see old friends and visit the remnants of the Raj at Barrackpore again where the whole park is undergoing a remarkable renovation. Imperial ghosts may drift through the builders' dust as the old Government House itself shakes off decades of decay and decrepitude and comes to life again, they are not unwelcome.  The aim of the restoration project is neither to bury them nor to forget their existence but to use best what is left from a part of Indian history for the advantage of present and future generations; as an educational, environmental and recreational resource and to encourage new tourism and tourist revenues into West Bengal and thereby into the country.

The project was begun when the former police Commissioner in Calcutta was moved sideways due to his unfashionable honesty and posted down the road to take charge of Barrackpore and its police training college. A historian first, as is his teacher wife, when instructed to review Government House, the then defunct police hospital, for demolition, he decided instead to restore it.  In fact he has a track record, previously implementing several restoration projects in Calcutta and now successfully raising state funding for the Barrackpore work.  The facade of the old house facing the river is already finished, the others will follow as work hurries on in the high airy rooms of the interior.  A sprung floor once danced upon by the Viceroy's ADCs and daughters is being relaid, hidden spiral staircases where generations of sweepers crept are suddenly exposed to view and, downstairs in the old servants quarters, a rudimentary museum is already in place.

A quickly made but comprehensive  and well-photographed, hooray for drone technology, documentary video focuses in particular on the importance of Barrackpore Park as an environmental repository, so close to the vast Calcutta sprawl, part indeed of Greater Kolkata and yet this backwater on the great Hooghly River has retained its natural wealth not least by its neglect.  New generations used to and educated in issues of environmental damage and depletion of flora and fauna, have a chance to retain in Barrackpore, among its gardens and jungly undergrowth, life that may already be lost elsewhere.  In addition to their day jobs and after hours historian's caps, the lead restorers of the Barrackpore estate have also written a book 'Under the Banyan Tree', to be published shortly, detailing the history of the houses and park since the early days of the East India Company in text and images.

Back in Calcutta itself the rain poured down and the temperature plummeted as we drank deeply and ate a delicious Bengali dinner between in the high ceilinged rooms and wide verandas of the old police accommodation block, another relic of the past where a huge dark wood staircase leads up to the first floor.  The next day, shopping first, Byloom for charming children's prints and designs, then the Indian museum in the early evening for a recital in the quadrangle by a Russian pianist as the sliver of a moon rose above the white colonnades and on to drinks and platefuls of this and that to eat in the Bengal Club Bar.  This somehow typical Calcutta gathering included the Bengali/Punjabi Christian widow, maiden name remarkably Khan, of a Rajput royal whose mother in law aged 90 still fumes over the mesalliance so many years ago from her home in Jaipur; the long divorced Bengali Muslim who worked for years in New York for the UN and has since run the arts festival in Pittsburgh where she lives who still fasts and gives up alcohol for Ramzan; a recently widowed Marwari businessman whose mistresses were once legion and this writer, British and simply fascinated by the wealth of stories encouraged by a cocktail of whisky, vodka, tequila and wine and fed so gloriously unsuitably with bacon and cheese puffs.

In Bombay it was time for he drapers and the tailor for
multiple pairs of the ever larger sized white cotton trousers my husband persists in wearing whatever the British winter weather.  By now too, after a gross or two of white cotton, he could have had a wardrobe of Savile Row suits for the price. India is not the cheap option it once was for tailored clothes as I remembered when I thought I WOULD after all have those particularly comfortable trousers and silk shirts of my own copied half a dozen times.  Then a round of lunches, teas and dinners and all the gossip of recent months, the Ambani wedding, Amitabh Bachchan in rows of emerald beads rendering the puja prayers into English for the edification of the guests including a front row of all the Bollywood stars, some flown in by private jet for the occasion.  Conspicuous consumption gone mad as Mukesh Ambani lays his path towards overtaking Jeff Bezos in the wealth and influence stakes through providing cheap electronic communications to the Indian masses and offering them a slice of international online consumerism.  What was the story of the Jaipur Lit Fest, why did William Dalrymple resign?  Rumour and counter rumour and what about the British Royal Family and Duchess Megan?  The gupshup is international these days but still thrives best when face to face.

Finally back to a wonderful Goan garden, developed and over-developed Goa less joyous or scenic as the rubbish piles up on the side of the road and the quality of tourism takes a dive as infrastructure fails to keep up with demand.  The major luxury hotels are not the answer - the more exclusive, the less escapes their international operation into the local economy.  Government and tourist organisations need to work better together and the government must get its own house in order and re-create a relatively pristine environment if tourism is to continue to provide a proper means of income for the state and its people.

Meanwhile the unregulated building goes on, half made constructions scar perfect hillsides previously decorated only by the whitewashed facade of a 16th century church peeping through the palms. The concrete bones of great unfinished flyovers and roads march across the landscape and do nothing as yet to ease the traffic chaos.  This was once a paradise of untouched beaches and laid back low level tourism with a few high end hotels catering to the relatively discerning and busy little restaurants serving fish straight out of the sea cooked in Goan style and followed with heavy sweet puddings of Portuguese origin.  Perhaps some of that can resurface from the growing mess - local people and local tourism organisations are willing and ready but government must take the lead and work on an overall plan.  Such a pointless thing to write is the truth but it only takes one person with a vision and the will to push it through.

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A short stay in Pakistan

My family along with others like us who are lucky enough to have travelled beyond the confines of the school ski trip, the summer seaside rental, or the educational tours of European capitals, have nevertheless been affected by fear of the bogey man.  Once it was old Boney, now it is 'Islam'. Well of course it isn't but a fear of terrorism in the name of religion that has whole populations risking loss of home, livelihood, nationality, or, most desperately and tragically, nothing more than an alternative and no less final way of death than the bomb blast, the shooting or the beheading, has infected the world. As global the distances are shrunk by quicker communications that link peoples ever more closely and immediately, fear of the unknown other drags us apart again.  Reason and common sense are being torn from us and, most shamingly, our humanity.  We are avoiding other countries and nationalities, pulling up drawbridges and building walls.  In the case of the UK we are currently engaged in a political battle to break ties with our nearest neighbours - the most emotive argument for Brexit involves the hungry hordes of migrants, in brackets, muslim migrants, waiting across the British Channel to overrun our green hills. We are becoming frightened of our own shadows and forgetful of the lessons of history. Our fear of ungoverned humankind let loose may help to create the conditions for Hobbes 'war of all against all' when proper government and political community break down altogether.

In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things are require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is the worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short

So, to Pakistan for me for a bare ten days; the merest taste and snapshot of a complicated and contradictory country. The dreams of its remarkable founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah seem as lost as the recordings of his speeches of nearly seventy years ago, his vision for the country, narrowed in his brief and dying months in power, then quickly turned aside by successors with harder line or more acquisitive agendas. Now Pakistan struggles to break out of the domestic stranglehold of political corruption, overweening military power and dictatorship and to change its international reputation, ambiguous to say the least, for its attitude towards Islamic extremism and state-sponsored terrorism. 

Other battles are afoot as the country tries to build its economy through closer ties with China and encouragement of other foreign investors. Meanwhile almost half of Pakistan's GDP is still derived from agriculture. A few thousand families have hold most of land and political power in the country in a hereditary feudal system that was reinforced if not wholly invented by the British and maintains until today. The poor remain poor, the tax system is mired in fraud, and religion, ruling life, regularly and publicly observed, might well be said to be the opium of the masses. Purdah is observed to a greater or lesser extent, particularly in traditional areas, while better off urban Pakistani women are known for their sense of fashion. Women under forty are becoming a new force in parliament through reserved women's seats. Drawn in general from the landed families who have traditionally held political power in Pakistan, these energetic young women are seen by some as little more than a contemporary gloss on the same old problems.

I arrived in Lahore by air from Delhi - a mistake but Indian friends are convinced the land border is a dangerous route.  It isn't, well no one in Pakistan thinks so. Whether or not there is time saved in crossing the Wagah border from Amritsar almost into Lahore rather than sitting on the tarmac at Delhi airport awaiting the pleasure of air traffic control to allow a Pakistani flight to take off is questionable.  Certainly the overland route would be of greater interest especially for the first time traveller. That misconceptions over security abound between India and Pakistan is perhaps less surprising in the light of recent history than the misconceptions of the rest of the world. Some cross border misunderstandings are more entertaining than otherwise.  

My official guide in Lahore was a true patriot whose views on India may have been toned down somewhat out of politeness to a visitor recently arrived from that side of the border. 'All Indians are vegetarian'. 'All Indians are dirty'. 'All Indians are HIndu.' Not quite direct quotes but very nearly. He was competitive to the point of ridicule on behalf of his country. During a discussion on fizzy drinks 'Imran, do you have a lot of diabetes here like India?', 'O here we have much worse diabetes.' 

'Imran, this looks like the something or other fort/palace/tomb in Lucknow/Jaipur/Bhopal'. - 'No this is older, bigger, better, more important in every way....'

And so on.....stopping the flow of information was not appreciated, Imran is on permanent transmit in his efforts properly to educate the visitor, but he made life a lot easier in the bazaars of old Lahore although the only real danger seemed possible death by motorcycle. The walled city is a maze of small streets and gullies running between its remaining six gates and foreign tourists are to say the least thin on the ground. I did not see another foreign face during my whole time in Pakistan although this short stay was only in one province and I believe things would be different in the capital, Islamabad

My goal and inspiration for this journey was the spectacular Derawar Fort in the Cholistan desert of the Southern Punjab. It is just one astonishing example of the chain of forts built along the path of the lost Sarasvati river to guard the invasion route to India from Central Asia.  Ultimately it became part of Bahawalpur State, now part of Punjab province,and once described by its ruler as having its front door opening on Pakistan and its back door to India. Like the charming Italianate palaces of Bahawalpur city, Derawar, which should be a hugely important heritage site, has suffered from the attentions of the Pakistan army compounded by lack of any interest in or care for the culture and history of the country by successive Pakistani governments.  

The visitor rapidly understands the power of the army in Pakistan that has given it free rein to pillage the movable whatever its true ownership and to vandalise the immovable. Thus the interior of Derawar Fort has been destroyed well within living memory, it's preservation not helped by legends of buried gold that have encouraged treasure hunters, including 1970s President and Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, to dig for it. It is said that the latest Commander in Chief does not suffer from the corruption that has infected the army like a cancer and has transformed the security situation in Pakistan in his tenure since 2013. Unfortunately it is hard to imagine that restitution for previous army crimes is likely to be high on his list of priorities in the present nervous climate. 

Other forts further out in the desert are being allowed to crumble into the sand - they were built by Hindu princes once upon a time and apparently have no relevance to a contemporary Islamic State where tourism has long since lost out to internal disinterest, army grabs and external fear. Bahawalpur is an attractive, well-planned provincial city of wide avenues, trees, palaces and the huge campus of the Sadiq Public School. Founded by Nawab Bahawal Khan Abbasi I in the mid-18th century, Bahawalpur City was added to progressively by his successors.  Today it should be full of visitors, its palaces preserved as museums or heritage hotels if not still as the homes of their original owners.  Instead the army has taken over, the cantonment pushes, bullies its way almost into the garden of the Sadiq Garh Palace at Dera Nawab Sahib; the Noor Mahal Palace is now army offices; other royal buildings are lost behind high walls and army security posts; the doors even of the glorious library, a public building, were firmly closed when I visited. Loss and waste.

When Mary Minto visited Lahore on a viceregal tour in 1909 she described the drive ‘through the most lovely palm avenues to the Shahdera, where Jahangir’s tomb rests in a beautiful garden’ and goes on ‘the white marble is inlaid with many coloured stones and agates and remains in wonderful repair…..Nur Jahan is also buried in the garden.  Her brother who assisted her in the government has also a mausoleum, the dome of which was covered with brilliant yellow tiles but most of them have fallen off and the Government finds it is too expensive to replace them while the art of producing these vivid colours has been lost. 

Not surprisingly over one hundred years later only a very few tiles remain on Asif Khan’s tomb to remind the viewer of past glory.  The worst damage to the tombs is not, however, due to recent neglect.  When the Sikhs conquered Lahore in 1799, Ranjit Singh removed much of their decoration to the Golden Temple at Amritsar and the memorial complex was used as a residence and barracks.  The proportions of the building are now its major attraction, the marble tomb itself centred under a dome that rests lightly on the arched walls of the great brick octagonal building, highlighted by the colours here and there of a patch of clinging tiles or decorative plaster work.

The ‘beautiful’ gardens are now, to all intents and purposes, a municipal park, full of picnickers and cricket players on a Sunday afternoon who might have been exchanged unnoticeably with almost identical crowds from Lodi gardens in Delhi a week earlier.  Mary described Jahangir’s tomb remaining in ‘wonderful repair’ and so it still appears although a conservation project begun over ten years ago is dwindling as badly paid skilled stonemasons leave for better paid unskilled jobs. Their traditional family skills are disappearing like the art of making coloured tiles, lost to lack of respect for heritage crafts and disinterest among younger generations in jobs that require long apprenticeships for little reward.  A work force in this case of two hundred has shrunk in a few years to only eight and they are muttering dissent.

Jahangir’s wife, Noor Jahan’s adjacent tomb is currently a building site which may augur well for its future if the necessary skills for its conservation do still exist. In the Old Town of Lahore a joint effort by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, the Walled City Authority, Government of the Punjab and the Norwegian Embassy shows what is possible with its truly wonderful restoration of the Shahi Hamam public baths. The work has extended even to immaculate visitor loos.  Further work is planned including preservation of the splendidly tiled Wazir Khan mosque whose builder was a native of Chiniot, known for the extraordinary skills of its traditional woodcarvers.

The Walled City is irresistible like all such ancient market and dwelling places where antique monuments have been surrounded and overtaken by daily life. A beautifully preserved haveli is hidden in plain sight like a Florentine Palazzo behind its anonymous façade, overlooked by the rush of life a busy street.  Inside a different world of decorated courtyards, peaceful gardens and elegant drawing.  The academic and artistic calm of the Naqsh art school is just round the corner of a tiny alley off a crowded thoroughfare. Here students of all ages and varieties can study subjects from calligraphy and miniature painting to graphic design on short or long courses up to degree level   Other old houses, less well-served, are now used as schools and offices, coloured tiles and painted plaster clinging here and there above the dirt and daily bustle.

Piles of rubbish are moved this way and that by energetic sweepers and cleaners but are seldom diminished for long. Toothbrush tree stick sellers stand by Delhi Gate; bakers, tea stalls, butchers; food stalls selling rations of boiled mutton for breakfast from huge pots; rows of shops full of sparkling wedding clothes; jewellery, real and fake; huge antique water pipes and loops of electricity cable like tangled hair held up with grips and clips and any old tie; carts loaded with dates; donkeys; endless motorcycles somehow missing the middle of the road pedestrian and everywhere the smell of roses, deep red petals drifting down streets overtaking the smells of food, drains and humanity en masse. It is reminiscent of much smaller Bhopal and far larger Cairo and equally enticing. (Bhopal like Bahawalpur was a Muslim ruled state whose Nawabs, mostly female in that matriarchal line, were advanced thinkers and developers of education for both sexes, transport systems, water supply, postal services and state administration)

Contemporary living is rarely so seductive although the passion for pigeons that embellishes the skyline of the old city with tiered bamboo pigeon lofts that soar from the rooftops of havelis and tenement buildings like scaffolding for miniature high rises, is unabated in the gardens of recently built residential areas like DHA, the Defence Housing Authority. This is a wealthy place of comfortable modern houses, security men patrolling outside the locked gates into gardens where feather footed fantail doves strut and coo, occasionally taking flight in choreographed groups that soon return to the safety of their dovecotes.  Pigeons and doves are everywhere, circling the tiled domes of the great mausoleums of Multan where the lofts appear more like rooftop hutches, wheeling out across the skies of Lahore or over any small village across the flat, fertile land of the Punjab, adding a particular romance and poignancy to most views.

Nowadays there is romance too in the old white colonial buildings from the same mould as Connaught Place in Delhi, shops along the Mall, the Gymkhana Club in Lawrence Gardens recognisable as such anywhere in the sub-continent.  Kim’s wonder house, the Lahore Museum on the Mall where John Lockwood Kipling was curator is closed on Mondays unfortunately for me.  The great gun, the Zam Zama stands outside the gates, marooned on its island between lanes of traffic; ubiquitous ‘Green Punjab’ tuk tuks flying by; imported cars, Japanese and German; donkey carts, their drivers standing at the reins like hopeful charioteers, buses and more cars….past monumental red brick Victorian buildings; the High Court; GPO, Punjab University and the Anglican Cathedral surrounded by old walls and new barbed wire. On then to famous Aitchison College founded on the British public school model or back to the older city where roads and flyovers criss cross by the 1960s ugly Minar-e-Pakistan against a longer view of the Lahore Fort with the three glowing bulbs of the domes of the Badshahi mosque rising above its walls.

In the modern city KFC, Pizza Hut and Macdonalds are as ubiquitous as coffee shops and ATMs and advertisements for well-known US and European chain stores are on every hoarding. The government has an open arms approach to foreign investors that may be responsible for remarkably straightforward money exchange with no form filling or passport scrutiny required.  Which international visitors might be staying in the big Lahore hotels, like the refurbished Faletti’s, built in the 1880s, all clustered together behind high security walls in the centre of the city , it is hard to tell. Business may be booming with business visitors moving from office to office in dark windowed Mercedes.  They are not in evidence elsewhere even at the airport where the greatest weight of arrivals and departures is of pilgrims to the important shrines of Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq. I am not sure whether travelling alone in Pakistan, staying in hotels however grand,  would or would not be a happy experience - the general view is probably not although I suspect the great tradition of hospitality in Pakistani culture does in fact encompass even so odd a creature as the single woman traveller.

I regret not visiting the splendidly castellated Lahore Railway station on the old Great Trunk Road although it holds tragic memories of Partition.  Pizza Hut and Macdonalds have apparently colonised its platforms as they have the excellent highways out of Lahore. They run between canals, tanneries and other industrial sites giving way to miles of commercial gardens, their produce on show on the road side and, further into the Punjab farmland, to fruit growers, acres of old and beautiful mango trees, turnip, potato, bright green wheat fields and herds of grazing cattle and buffalo.

The road to the Hiran Minar, Jahangir’s monument to his favourite pet antelope travels through less than picturesque industrial areas surrounding the town of Sheikhapura.  The minaret itself, the antelope’s grave by its side now hidden from view is part of a park complex with a pavilion or baradari at the centre of a large tank where deer once came to water. The fact that this is site has been on the ‘tentative list’ for UNESCO World Heritage Site status since 1993 has not saved the area from its fate as a local amenity, the small corner pavilions of the tank  are scrawled with graffiti and rubbish pollutes its water.

Lunch on the return journey to Lahore was, I gathered from my guide, a sine qua non for fish eaten on the banks of the Kanpur Canal. Rohu a member of the carp family and possibly other varieties of similar freshwater fish cut into rough slabs are fried in huge quantities and served with piles of spongy nan and cumin flavoured yoghurt/raita which is delicious.  I must admit, spoiled by island living, to being a moderate fan only of somewhat bony and muddy tasting carp and their coarser relations. The incredibly generous hospitality in Pakistan however naturally implies a lot of seriously good food, although I am not sure I appreciated either the fish or a local Multan delicacy of goat leg and head boiled for 12 hours quite as much as I should have done.  It would, on the other hand, be extremely easy to overeat without recourse to the dreaded Macdonalds.  For the time being people in the streets of Lahore look a lot leaner and fitter than their Indian cousins and certainly than our obese fast food loving Western populations, regardless of that diabetes and an endemic taste for very sweet sweets. Regretfully one must suppose that absence of alcohol is an additional health factor.

Much of the rich agricultural land round the ancient city of Multan, huge tracts, measured out in bighas, kanaals and squares and previously held by great landowning families, has been broken up into smaller parcels in recent years for industrial use . Those old enough to remember describe their father's and grandfather's estates, huge forested areas once private hunting preserves that have now been sold off to maintain their expected style of living and allotted in parcels, sized according to rank, to various army generals and more junior officers. The city of Multan itself is recorded in the time of Alexander the Great. Its continuing development as an industrial centre has not yet, for the visitor at least, overtaken its historic and religious atmosphere and the charm of its old bazaars but Multan is moving fast; a metro is being built, spoken of as a money making scam by locals who reasonably consider such mass transit systems unnecessary in this still relatively small city. 

Local crafts include traditional embroidered slippers, Khussa, that fit the feet literally like gloves and the famous Multan pottery in the blues and luminescent turquoise of the tiles that illuminate the city's spectacular shrines and those of Uch Sharif. In the cloth market, men bend over frames, creating magical zari embroidery, needles loaded with miniscule beads creating perfect glittering patterns with staggering speed.  Less sparkly embroidery, more to my taste, is displayed on delectable jewel coloured velvets and intricately woven silks.Multan is also well-known for its jewellery making. Once the preserve of HIndu craftsmen, local jewellers are now almost exclusively Ismaili Muslims.  

Such delights are of course a mere filip to Multan's true treasure, its unique heritage as the 'City of Saints' expressed in buildings, the massive domed shrines,  that are instantly recognisable from antique watercolours and prints if less well known by name. The architectural wealth is so great and time in my case so short that kind and informative friends could, in only a day, give me just a taste of the glories to be seen, the finest and best preserved whetting the appetite for future, longer visits.  The 14th century Shrine of Shah Rukh-E-Alam is probably the best known of the Multan tombs.  Pigeons fly round its white painted dome high above the city hubbub in the fort area; its walls and bastions of red brick woven with glorious blue and turquoise tiles are like great rich rolls of persian carpet . Inside the same turquoise spreads across the floor, the tiles gleaming in sunlit doorways smoothed to silken finish by the tread of thousands of feet. 

The shrines are tardis like, their interiors unexpectedly huge fields of white painted or blue tiled graves. Pilgrims lay tinselled covers on the canopied graves of the saints, whole families gather and pray.  The always unexpected note to eyes more used to monuments of icy stone and marble comes with glittery paper chains and a line in appalling kitsch plastic clocks. I have seen these clocks spreading like carbuncles across Africa and Asia, in places as diverse as dentists' waiting rooms, mosques, churches and cafes and it is hard to believe that someone in a a factory in China isn't having a laugh as they offload such horrors. The markets in Multan are in any case full of Chinese goods. The tomb of Shah Rukh-E-Alam, is on the UNESCO tentative World Heritage List. Historic damage to the area was caused by the armies of Ranjit Singh during the siege of Multan in the early 19th century, later compounded by the British in a punitive expedition against Mulraj, recalcitrant ruler of Multan in 1849. 

Staying in an art deco style modern farm house outside the city surrounded by fields and orchards,  there is duck shooting on offer - I have shot partridges in the Indian Punjab in such extreme winter cold that I set fire to a chimney stoking up the fire in that other farmhouse.  Electricity here is on and off and as in India generators are de riguer throughout Pakistan for those who can afford them.  On this occasion reverse air conditioning held up well enough to remove the requirement for dangerous conflagration. Fishing was for more enormous carp in a pond in front of the house where we sat on the verandah to eat huge breakfasts of puri, eggs, halwa and delicious local fruit in the early morning sun. The famous Multan mangoes, several dozen varieties, sadly not in season for months yet.

I spent an unexpected morning well outside the usual remit of  the tourist at the Police Training Institute in Multan.  The Punjab police force has a local reputation for honesty rare in this part of the world that may be explained by this astonishing educational establishment. On a campus that would do credit to a famous public school or army officer training college in this country, recruits, ranging from those with masters' degrees to young men from villages with no electricity or running water, are taught first of all to live and work together and then to serve their people over and  above any other consideration. I have to say, observing the tall and imposing instructors teaching courses course, that I would certainly ask how high if they told me to jump.  I was highly relieved when the female officer detailed to look after me finally relaxed enough to smile - as usual the female of the species is more deadly than the male. Courses originally running for 6 months now have an extra 10 week anti-terrorist training. 

The campus is immaculate, classes from the academic and theoretical to deafening rifle practice and physical fitness taking place on wide fields fringed by spotless dormitories, messes, a medical facility, laundry, barber and even a photographic shop producing souvenir items - my favourite the black mug that reveals a photograph when filled with hot liquid. Food is cooked by professional cooks in a row of vast tandoors by the dining hall and is delicious. All this to the credit of a Principal who, in spite of an army background, looks, in his tweed coat, sounds and behaves more like a thoughtful academic at any of the great universities of the world than someone who has spent most of his life in uniform including serving with the UN in Bosnia. He carries an air of humanity and serious educational intent that seems to pervade his domain. With our own famous police college at Hendon now closed and our policing standards, judging by recent scandals, consequently reduced, it is hard not to think that we could learn a thing or two from so impressive an establishment.  

A twilight drive to visit the Shrine of Hazrat Sher Shah to the south of Multan, brought us further to the old British railway bridge over the wide sweep of the Chenab river, one of the major water ways of the sub-continent  that flows from Himachal Pradesh through Jammu and Kashmir into the Punjab. Its waters currently allocated to Pakistan under the controversial Indus Waters Treaty, Alexander the Great is believed to have been responsible for the founding of the city of Uch Sharif at the Chenab's confluence with the Indus river.  Now 100 km distant from the remains of the city, flooding of the river in the early 19th century caused greater damage to its shrines than Sikh and British armies achieved at a similar time in Multan. The shrines, built a century or so after that of Shah Rukh-E-Alam are, perhaps because of their fragility, highly atmospheric and considerable conservation work is now being carried out on the area, not least to remove earlier ill-thought repairs that had served to damage their structures further.  

Uch Sharif is within touching distance of Bahawalpur where I finished this brief journey of exploration among the beautiful tombs and shrines of the Abbasi family, formerly Nawabs of the state of Bahawalpur.  They lie, still sacrosanct and peaceful in a private cemetery just to the east of the broken bones of Fort Derawar. The secrets of its subterranean chambers, hidden tunnels that may stretch all the way back to the palace at Dera Nawab Sahib, lost treasure, djinns, old history and older magic may be buried with the dead in this calm and quiet space.