Mud volcanoes go here

They go "blop" a lot, and are fun to stick your fingers in. I'll leave it to you to imagine how muddy I got today.

Midwinter city breaks in all the wrong places

So this episode takes place back in February, when I was tangled up in the forest of red tape and consular interviews and demands for parental and spousal permission that accompanies any attempt to gain travel documents for Central Asian countries. In this bureaucracy-befuddled state, a minibreak sounded just the ticket, and location-wise the fact that you could get the relevant travel documents in a couple of hours with no questions asked was all a country needed to recommend itself to me. Uzbekistan has only one neighbour which is so enthusiastic about handing out visas, and so it was that within a couple of days of hatching this brilliant plan I found myself eyeing the Uzbek-Afghan border post with a vague sense of apprehension and wishing that I would think my decisions through a bit more thoroughly sometimes.

The border is delineated by the murky brown Amu Darya, still imposing this far east before fading into irrigation-drained ignominy before ever reaching the Aral Sea. When it was still the Oxus, Alexander the Great floated his armies across the river here on hide rafts in order to ravage the eastern satrapies of the Persian empire; now the two countries are linked by the Soviet “Friendship Bridge” (all the better to invade you with, my dear). It’s a remarkably sharp dividing line - I’ve never crossed a border where the contrast of the two sides has been so absolute. On the Afghan side, there was an atmosphere of barely-suppressed chaos quite unlike the ordered blandness of Uzbek Termez. The traffic was heavy with exuberantly decorated lorries redolent of the subcontinent, auto rickshaws and dignified old men on donkeys, everyone wrapped in shawls and blankets to keep out the freezing wind. I was painfully aware of the fact that I was the only woman on the street, and felt increasingly uncomfortable as I waited for my ride - not so much unsafe, as keenly aware that here far more than anywhere else in the world, anything could happen and quite probably would.

On the drive through barren, windswept and snow-sprinkled desert to Mazar-i-Sharif, we passed convoys of the international troops stationed nearby: Swedes, Croatians, Germans, and, of course, Americans, rolling slowly past in their humvees, holding up the traffic for miles behind them - they are said to be under orders to shoot at any car that comes too close, so everyone keeps a careful distance. Although Mazar and its immediate environs are considered “safe” by Afghan standards, an awareness of the war penetrates everything and there is a tension in the air that is palpable (although how much of it was I imagining, because I knew?). Mazar itself is an odd, mixed up city with expensive new glass buildings (“mafia money”, muttered my host darkly) standing side by side with mud houses along unpaved, heavily rutted and rubbish-strewn roads, while the immense mountains of the Hindu Kush rising to the south. Electricity is intermittent, so the city reverberates at night to the rumble of hundreds of private generators. Sometimes I could believe I was in any Central Asian city, as I was pursued by carpet salesmen, moneychangers and taxi drivers , but then I'd turn a corner and see a tank easing its way ominously down a side street. I couldn’t stop staring at the tanks whenever I saw them, they seemed so unreal, as though I’d stumbled onto a film set by mistake. I don’t think I’d even seen a tank outside of a museum before, and didn’t that slam home to me just how unbelievably I am to have been born somewhere where that's the case. Mazar may be peaceful, but it doesn't stay that way spontaneously.

The heart of the city, and the only ancient building of note is the Blue Mosque and shrine of Hazrat Ali, the burial place of the Prophet’s son-in-law, and another hugely important site of pilgrimage for Muslims. I’d seen a photo of this building at an impressionable age, and had been determined to see it for a long, long time. Although much smaller and arguably less impressive than the Haram in Mashhad, it makes a better impression because it isn't cut off from the secular city like the other place, and it's easier to take it all in at once. Rather than glittering gold, every inch is covered with the bright blue of lapiz lazuli, the colour always synonymous in my mind with Afghanistan. The weak wintery light didn’t do it many favours, and it's decorated at night night with unevenly hung strings of flashing lights that unfortunately bring to mind the Christmas decorations at my local shopping mall back home, which is not a good thing, but at dusk it becomes special. Non-Muslims aren’t allowed inside, and unlike in Mashhad, no one suggested I try, so I circled the walls and again, watching women in blue and white burqas feed the flock of pure white doves (every seventh dove contains the soul of a saint, and the overall effect is so holy that should a grey dove join the throng, it will turn white within forty days) and men in jeans and leather jackets loiter drinking tea in defiance of the snow.

For, with my usual impeccable sense of timing, I had arrived at what turned out to be the coldest week of the year, as a sudden freezing snap enveloped the whole region. Dozens of people were killed in avalanches on the main road south to Kabul, all the water pipes froze (except those in the public baths, and now I know it only takes three days without a shower to overcome my terribly British reticence regarding com`munal bathing) and the 80 km stretch of (good) road between Mazar and the border became so dangerously icy that I had to prolong my stay for several days. I spent a considerable amount of time huddling around coal stoves in unventilated rooms trying to remember if this was how people died of carbon monoxide poisoning, while my friends reminisced about how lovely the region was come about April or so. One of my hosts was a DJ at a multilingual Mazar radio station, and decided to take full advantage of this opportunity to inject some English into his programmes, and thus my discovery that there is nothing so terrifying, in Afghanistan or elsewhere, than a live microphone that someone expects you to talk into. My international broadcasting career began with a slightly uncertain introduction to the Black Eyed Peas, and hearing my voice coming out of the car radio while creeping along beind a convoy of tanks was one of the odder moments of my life.

We were on the way to Balkh, a small market town about half an hour from Mazar with a lot of stray dogs and rubbish in the streets and two thousand year old city walls and not a lot to distinguish the fact that it was once Bactria, the mother of cities and a pearl of the Silk Road. Ravaged by earthquakes, droughts, Jenghiz Khan and other occupational hazards of Central Asia, there is now barely anything to remind one of its glory days as the place where Zoroaster was born and the Alexander the Great was married and more trade passed through the markets here than through Samarkand and Bukhara combined. The remains of a mosque and mausoleum crumble in the filthy central square, and I suddenly thought about what London might look like in 200 years, which was not a very pleasant thought so I stopped thinking it. But a little way out of the city lie the ruins of the oldest mosque in the country, over thousand years of decay but still standing, with the faintest traces of lapiz lazuli in niches covering every column, which were once studded with the gemstones. UNESCO had covered the whole thing with an awful corrugated iron roof and there was no one there but the caretaker's cat and chickens (who got on surprisingly well) but it was still living; people still come on Fridays to pray there. Later, back in Mazar and politely trying to convince the local carpet salesmen that I really did not need a carpetal representation of Amir Timur (and let me just take a moment to say that no one, be they Ayatollah Khomeini or your pet Labrador, is improved by putting them in a carpet, and it is a mistake to try), I was offered silver Bactrian coins dug up from the fields around Balkh (I wish I could say it was my ethical stance against the looting of cultural heritage rather than a lack of cash that made me demur, but that would be very, very untrue). Bactria was still there, still not quite dead, and I thrilled at it.

Except that getting starry-eyed over romanticised versions of the past when the present is so imperfect and the future is so uncertain is troublesome here more than anywhere. At dinner with a family I’d met at the shrine, we sat around an oil lantern eating pilau, admiring babies and discussing wedding plans and politics. The presence of the coalition troops inspired no great ire in anyone I spoke to: "Only backward people hate the Americans. Everyone else just wants to work for them" (although it's worth noting that I was also told that "only backward people wear burqas". In a week I saw precisely one woman apart from me who wasn't wearing a burqa.) Yet there is clearly discontent: the day before I arrived, a Taliban member of the Afghan police force had killed two Swedish soldiers and their just outside the city. The local lad had been engaged, and working with the troops to save money for his marriage later that month. This story was the main topic of discussion for that week, but spoken about with resignation, in the knowledge it would soon be superceded by another tiny tragedy, even here, in the safest part of the country. Still, the consensus seems to be that things are slowly, slowly getting better. And yet, I couldn't help feeling that the presence of the coalition troops here was daft. This is not really the place for a discussion of the rights and wrongs of the invasion, but Afghanistan felt so much more foreign to me than anywhere else I'd ever visited, so self-contained and self-involved that the very idea that any Western power could successfully impose by force a an alien form of government on this country s ludicrous and the very height of hubris. I suppose it remains to be seen. The troops don't seem to be going anywhere for the moment, and they keep some kind of order in Mazar, but I can't see where it is going to end.

Back at the border, the Afghan official ran an uninterested eye over my passport, then invited me to share his lunch. Across the river I knew I could expect an hour's wait, a thorough interrogation and a search of every pocket and bag. I figured I could stay just a little longer.

Thalassa, thalassa

I've reached the Caspian Sea! I haven't seen the sea for a very long time so it's good to be back by the water. Even if said water carries a certain oily sheen. Baku has been an oil boom town for over a century, and boy does the landscape around the city show it. I believe the correct adjective is "dystopian". I am apparently going to have a lot of time to appreciate it, as the next ferry to Aktau in Kazakhstan is unlikely to leave until Friday or so. The concept of timetables or schedules for this kind of transportation has yet to catch on here.

Azerbaijan has been a pleasant surprise so far. I was extremely grumpy about having to leave Tbilisi with its coffee shops and wireless hotspots and dilapidated European architecture and khachapuri and plum conserve for a country which I expected to be expensive, time-consuming and tiresome (an impression based, entirely unfairly, on my experience of getting the bloody visa, but six separate embassy visits can do that to a person). And then I spent my first night in a tiny village eating the greatest dolma in the world because I'd met a girl on the bus, and the second at the best hotel in the next town being wined and dined for absolutely nothing, because her father knew someone. Good going, Azerbaijan!

Something I've really missed: Central Asian grannies, lurking under their multicoloured headscarves, sweet and innocent right up until the alcohol comes out and you find that the words "No thanks, I think I've had enough!" have no meaning for them. Still, mulberry vodka is pretty damned good *collapses*

Iran again

OK, I suck at travel blogging. I'm sitting on no fewer than six half-finished posts including Afghanistan, Turkmenistan and India, which were months ago. But! I am stuck in Tblisi waiting for visas (Kazakhstan, the promotional literature that your consul showered me with assures me you are A Beacon Of Progress! I find this hard to believe when your visa application process is more convoluted than, to take an example at random, Afghanistan's.) in a hostel with free wireless, so that means spam time. First up is Iran, which had plenty of good bits which did not involve police stations.

While if you were to choose any city in Iran to be stuck in for three weeks while police conducted enquiries about you it would be unlikely that you would light upon Mashhad as your first choice, it probably gave me a better feel for the country, specialised policemen and all, than the same amount of time spent wandering around in rhapsodies over Persepolis (not that I wouldn‘t, on balance, have probably preferred the latter). Mashhad is short on tourist sites and tourist traffic (apart from religious tourists), but has great ice cream and is very well-stocked with Iranians, who I think most visitors would agree are by far the best thing about a trip to the country. Over the past year, I’ve become used to the effusiveness of Central Asian hospitality, so the fact that enthusiasm with which I was invited into homes, English classes, music lessons, birthday parties, ancestral villages and goodness knows what else really took me by surprise is saying a lot. I've rarely been in a country where the language barrier was so universal, and not being able to eve begin to read the shop signs and so on was very disconcerting (my proudest achievement in three weeks was learning to distinguish between the men and women’s toilet signs in Farsi) but this was more than compensated for by the determination of complete strangers to make sure I was OK and knew where I was going and what did I think about Iran and did the English people like Iran and did they know that the Iranian people wanted a just peace and also nuclear energy and so forth (on several occasions I had taxi drivers making detours to pick up English speaking friends or relatives so we could discuss these topics more effectively). Hospitable, smart (so many engineers!), erudite (the poetry, you guys), and with a incredible ability to picnic at the drop of a hat (I have come away with a vague impression that all Iranian car boots are equipped with a barbeque and skewers of marinated chicken ready to go at a moment’s notice), Iranians rapidly became some of my favourite people ever.

Travelling alone as a woman in Iran was also surprisingly easy, dress code apart (of which more anon). Solo travel as a woman in Central Asia means accepting a certain level of hassle from pretty much any guy you meet, which by now I've got pretty good at ignoring, but the taboo on interacting with unrelated members of the opposite sex in public in Iran meant that this almost completely disappeared (almost. It seems that everywhere in the world there are guys who think that following a woman in a car and persistently offering her a ride is alluring. Hint: it's not). In private houses there's no segregation at all, but once I'd got used to being relegated to the back of the bus, the public divide was almost relaxing. The camaraderie in all-female environments was instant and comforting; I felt more at ease here than in most other countries I've travelled in, confident that if I got into difficulties there would be an army of helpers at my back, all of whom I could rely on not to ask if I needed company in my hotel room that night.

That said, the legally enforced dress code makes it difficult to forget that you're in a country where the government, at least, finds your gender strange and somewhat troublesome. Women are required by law to dress modestly: in practice for foreigners and most younger women), this means a long trench coat which reaches to at least mid-thigh, plus headscarf. Opinions seem to vary as to how much hair is acceptable. In most of the city, no one really seemed to mind when my headscarf fell off (as it frequently did) as long as I put it back on again; however, every so often I would be accosted by a woman who would firmly tuck any escaping tendrils of hair back under my scarf. Mashhad is generally a religious, conservative city, and I though saw no burqas at all (unlike Afghanistan, where they were pretty much universal) and very few niqabs; the garment of choice for most of the women in Mashhad was the chador (for a quick pictorial primer on Islamic dress for women, see here). This literally means "tent", and is basically a large cotton sheet (usually in fashionable black) that you drape around yourself and hold closed with a greater or lesser degree of expertise (guess which category I fell into). This garment rapidly became my nemesis: I never got the hang of even putting it on, and found it impossible to take myself seriously wearing one (a feeling enhanced by the fact that I was invariably wearing somebody's spare, which was usually in an appalling pink paisley pattern and made me feel like I was wearing a duvet cover). I felt the overall effect was rather like a bad Halloween costume crossed with a toga party gone horribly wrong, and I never required the level of expertise necessary to look remotely dignified when walking in it. My only comfort was that I was not the only one - many other smart young women seemed to be struggling, and some of the more pragmatic had opted for bulldog clips as the preferred method of keeping the damn thing on.

I estimated about 60 - 70% chador coverage in day to day usage, but they were compulsory wear at many religious sites, and above all when visiting Mashhad‘s raison d‘etre, the Haram, or shrine of Imam Reza. The eight Imam of Shia Islam was martyred here during the ninth century, and the shrine surrounding his tomb has grown into an enormous glittering complex of golden domes and minarets and courtyards and fountains and flags and spires that look like a Baghdad from 1001 Nights (although most of it has been built or rebuilt since the Islamic Revolution, and golden minarets sure lose their mystique when you see them in their pre-gilded concrete state) and should really be off shining on a hill somewhere rather than peeking out between gloomy concrete hotel blocks and its very own ring road. It is one of the foremost sites of pilgrimage for Shia Islam, and millions come to visit every year. Visitors of all religions are welcome in the magnificent blue-tiled courtyards and museums full of donations from grateful pilgrims (including a whole floor full of stuffed fish. No, I’m not sure why either) but non-Muslims are not technically supposed to enter the holiest parts of the shrine, surrounding the Imam’s tomb. However, it's a little difficult not to: even on the occasions when I visited without my friends, I was surrounded by helpful women who assumed that of course I would want to pray there, and firmly pulled inside one carpet-covered entrance.

(A brief aside on this: my feelings about my decision to visit the shrine are decidedly mixed. Almost every foreign tourist who comes to Mashhad ends up visiting, and in general people are pretty relaxed about it; the unspoken rule seems to be that as long as you observe the dress code and behave respectfully, no one will question your presence. Regardless of this, the official rule is no non-Muslims, and I prefer to respect the boundaries people place on their places of worship - I had initially decided not to try to enter the shrine itself. However, when it came to it I was entreated and encouraged by every Iranian that I met to do so, to the point where I felt that refusing would cause more offence, and, let's be honest, this kind of thing fascinates me and I was really, really curious).

The gilded exterior is fabulous enough, but the interior is astonishing. Just like any medieval cathedral in Europe, religious devotion backed by political might combines to form something magnificent that is designed to awe. Every surface covered by carved or painted or mirrored tiles in an overwhelming riot of colour and opulence and splendour. Pilgrims kiss the golden doors and stream through to the central halls, lit by an eerie green (the colour of Shia Islam) light cast by spiral energy-saving light bulbs set incongruously in vast and intricate chandeliers, illuminating the tomb of the Imam himself which is surrounded by a vast cage of silver and gold. Screens divide the hall in two for men and women, with half the tomb on each side, but from both the susurration of hundreds of people whispering in fierce, intense and earnest prayer, each individual entirely focussed on the tomb and on fighting their way through the throng to touch the gilded cage, push money and gifts through the grille and beg the Imam for his assistance. Despite the number of people, it felt very private, hundreds of personal conversations with the Imam. At the back women sat cross legged reading the Koran and reciting prayers, some weeping, some readjusting their chadors knocked askew during the struggle for the tomb, some retying them to gear up for another attempt. Keeping order were half a dozen stern and severely-dressed young women armed with long-handled green feather dusters to prod individuals who were getting a bit overenthusiastic and clinging to the cage a little too devotedly. One of them eyed me suspiciously, but the presence of my Iranian friends seemed to reassure her, and I hurriedly moved on.

So intense is the atmosphere surrounding the tomb itself that it was a relief to escape downstairs to the family mosque. Brand new and covered with mirrored tiles, yet somehow managing to avoid looking like the interior of a giant disco ball, it’s a place where the sexes can mingle, and was blessedly relaxed; old women in wheelchairs, and small girls tripping over their too-long chadors and whacking their brothers with strings of prayer beads while their parents prayed - this was clearly a family day out. In a way, this was the most interesting part of the shrine, because while I recognised the intense devotion from various religious sites and events I’ve visited in Europe, I've never encountered such a relaxed environment at a place of worship back home. Probably it exists in some places, but here it bespeaks a religion that permeates everyday life and society as a whole in a way that Christianity doesn't quite anymore, at least not so much in Western Europe. I do wonder if it ever used to be like that back home, if the pilgrims at Canterbury used to bring their kids and plonk them down at the back of the shrine in the charge of grandma while they went to pray. This is one of the ways I felt I barely scratched the surface of Iran: in a way it's a much more liberal country than many in the west give it credit for (or at least, it has an expanding, highly educated middle class which is much more liberal than its government) and the way the majority of people seem to practice religion here is at odds with the strict theocracy that the Ayatollahs would like to believe that they have, or the stereotypical portrayal in so much of the Western media. Ayatollahs or not, people would still come here in vast numbers; the Imam is far bigger than the Revolution. One day I am going to get to Persepolis, but the scenes at the Haram are I think always going to be the most vivid memories I have of Iran. Mainly I feel as though I learned more about what Iran isn't than about what it is, which makes it even more frustrating I can't come back. This country has got to me in a way that others haven't, and it's going to be lurking at the back of my mind for a long time.

The frosty Caucasus

That is all.