The central area of the city is largely traffic free, constructed from sand-coloured stone, buildings with flat roofs, frequent domes and mosque facades all turquoise and dark blue lapis lazuli tiles. Merchants languorously ply their trade under shaded arches: watercolours, ornate chess sets, carpets, spices, metalware and tourist trinkets, but its recent history is far blacker. The city featured significantly during the nineteenth century in what is known as the great game played out by the Russian and British empires jostling for domination in the area. One of the direst incidents involved the imprisonment of two British intelligence officers, Stoddart and Conolly, who were detained by the fierce emir, Nasrullah Khan, in vermin-infested pits for months before being beheaded at the age of thirty-five.

  Exchanging currency almost matches the conditions during the Weimar Republic and requires stamina and strength. Fifty dollars will bring you a brick size of local ‘Sum’ currency, so you can tell a wealthy man by the bulge in his suit pockets (yes, ancient looking grey-suit pockets).

  Tomorrow the Turkmenistan land border and the Karakum desert, the most feared and dangerous section of the old Silk Road in days gone by when caravans weren’t motorised.

  I am really pleased to be on very good terms with our lady guide Fatima. She calls me Jerry and I call her Fatty. Thin as a rake she is, of course.

  Before we set off to cross the Karakum desert, like many hardy travellers before us, there is the simple matter of crossing the land border post into Turkmenistan. Simples – er, no. Five long hours it took to process twenty people. I think I have stumbled on the reason the country only has 5,000 visitors a year. They don’t want any more. In fact, I don’t think they want any. I think this is an all-time record for me; even Gatwick airport only took 2.5 hours to exit on one occasion. One day I’ll write a paper on how it’s done.

  Second hurdle: crossing the mighty rakish brown Oxus River which used to flow into the Aral Sea to the north. We were all ordered out off the bus to prevent the bus sinking into the wide river on the shaky pontoon bridge, probably built by Alexander the Great around 353 BC; well, not quite that old. Half a mile on foot in blistering sun, made worse by huge fully laden trucks, clearly not affected by the rules we were subjected to, rumbling past in both directions and clearly much heavier than our bus even with our twenty bodies. Once we had crossed safely, time for a much-needed late lunch in a local Russian restaurant in Turkmenabat just across the border into Turkmenistan. A culture shock in spades. While all the women on the street were wearing ankle length dresses and demure bodices, in the restaurant, a dimly lit and gaudy nightclubish French boudoir setting, tall blond buxom Russkies wore short tight black skirts and menacing scowls. The cold beer hit the spot, however.

  And so, onwards to this isolated southern sector of the Karakum desert road whose surface was more suited to camels’ hooves than vehicle wheels: sand dunes, scrub, endless featureless horizons and what at first looks like a covering of snow. It turns out to be salt forced to the surface by a high-water table and much bad land management. In days gone by, a fire would have been lit on top of a desert minaret to guide approaching caravans. These days, gas flares have replaced them, in the oil and gas fields dotted along this barren and isolated route. This must have been a desolate and dangerous section of the Silk Road when progress at camel speed was slower than for today’s vehicles. Even for us, a long five hours to the one-time major oasis city of Merv, or Mary as it is called today, an ancient and welcome site for travellers, even these days. Not a road for your transport to break down on.

  And so, onwards to the Turkmenistan’s capital city: Ashgabat, and surely one of the most astonishing capital cities of the world (but I haven’t made Pyongyang yet), situated between the mountainous border with Iran thirty miles away and the vast Karakum deserts stretching nearly a thousand kilometres northwards towards the border with Kazakhstan. Why so astonishing? Well, where to start: perhaps the fact that all the major buildings, offices, hotels, monuments, mosques, palaces are all faced with gold leaf and expensive white Carrara marble from Italy; that even the thousands of fancy French-style street lampposts are also covered in gold filigree work as far as the eye can see; or the million plus shrubs and small trees planted in straight lines, half of them dead from the heat. New is good here, but to be scrupulously fair, the place was raised to the ground in an earthquake in 1948, killing thousands, including members of the then president’s family, so building opportunities were manifold.

  Then there is the odd sandstorm for luck, or bad luck. Or the fact there is not a soul on the streets, entering or leaving buildings, walking the parks, with the exception of the odd street-cleaner, each one sweeping a minute pile of dust into the kerb? Because this city is so spotlessly clean everywhere you could eat your breakfast on the street and not get sick. And at night every building, blocks of flats and every monument is lit up like a Christmas tree. With casinos very popular with visiting Iranians, Las Vegas had better look to its laurels.

  Well, they do have the fourth largest supply of natural gas in the world, yet despite petrol being 28p a litre, the roads are nearly empty all day long, except for their brief version of ‘rush hour’. Cars are flashy, especially compared with the clapped-out wrecks driven by the peasants in the rest of the country. But it’s not all good news; temperatures hit 50 ˚C in summer, minus 20C in winter, and there are not many air conditioners outside the capital.

  We popped into a space-age rocket-shaped glittering gold-plated hotel to look around to see how the other 0.0001 live. 155 rooms and a handful of wealthy guests, for example, an Arab gentleman who owns 80 racehorses, therefore a gymkhana. The hotel has never seen a coach load turn up on their doorstep and they had to go and find someone to man the bar, completely empty like the rest of the city but well stocked. And the presidential palace? Well, three huge gold leaf domes on a building two blocks square, all golden doors and gold tipped crenellated walls. Quite a few cops everywhere. Monuments soaring skywards, some with external glass lifts (VIPS only so we were refused entry). And no prizes for guessing which country has the largest mosque in Central Asia with a capacity of 20,000 souls? Yep. How many were praying there when we arrived? Twenty-four, including our party of twenty. The capital in a nutshell? Think average wealthy Arab’s bathroom fittings on speed. The letter K, as in kitsch is a very common in the local language.

  Now I realise this hardly describes the interesting history of this part of the world, but you get all that from Wikipedia if so inclined.

  And il presidente? Well, that needs a chapter on its own. Mind-blowing. Oh yes, still no plug in the bathroom sink. All together: Back to the USSR. (Big) brother Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow, Gurby to his friend, is not a name you are probably familiar with, but if you had set foot, I mean one step, inside Turkmenistan, you would recognise his face, because from the instant you arrive at the border until the very last moment you leave, you will see his face everywhere. Think ‘Kilroy was here’.

  A man of many talents according to the photos and other media portraying him as a man of action, a man of the people, all showing his impressive molars. Let me explain. Old Gurby was dentist to the then first leader of the country, so it was a natural career move from dentist to president. My own dentist has similar ambitions actually. And again, it is only natural that the Institute of Dentistry should be shaped like a giant molar, isn’t it?

  Let’s start with a trip round the Ashgabat National Museum of History, actually a very fine museum rather like a luxury hotel with a vast lobby and huge pillars but with more staff than visitors. To one side is a room outlining the talents of old Gurby, at the reins of a prancing horse, both with a fixed smile to be seen in every other image of il presidente, playing the accordion, embracing a toothless crone in some far-off village, chewing the cud with a couple of gnarled old wise men, shaking hands with a pained-looking fellow president Sarkozy in Paris, stoking a campfire in the bundu somewhere with well-placed horse in one corner of the picture, hunting dogs to the fore, all neatly positioned to give an overall impression of peace and prosperity, mainly his I suspect. No wife and kids on show though. Funny that. And then there is the girls’ school annual photo, girls all in smart uniforms in four rows, but wait; what is that lurking in the background beaming over their heads, neatly super-imposed between two chosen pupils? Why, it is old Gurby, neatly photoshopped into position like the angel Gabriel beaming over his flock.

  Let’s move on to the carpet section for a change of scene; after all the country is famous for its Turkmen tribal rugs using geometrical designs. Wait a minute, what’s that on the wall? Yes, a huge carpet, probably ten feet by twelve feet, depicting, yes, old Gurby. Would you believe it?

  Time to get out of here, for a change of scene off down the eight-lane highway to the so-called Arch of Neutrality, a fine piece of architecture with external lift to whisk you towards, er, towards… Can it be? Yes, well done, you’ve guessed it: a gold-plated statue of il presidente (to be fair, it was his predecessor, but watch this space) which rotates so that is always faces the sun. They have 300 days of sunshine a year, Gurby’s orders. To keep you going on the way home, old Gurby beams down on us mortals from electronic screens every few hundred metres along the highways above the (minimal) traffic. Perhaps that is why there is so little. Guess who features in Turkmenistan Airlines magazine? Modesty prevents him appearing in a pilot’s uniform. If only we had kept old Gordon (Brown) a bit longer, we might have had our own version.

  But let’s end on an upbeat note, because our trip ends five hundred miles to the north in the fertile and ancient oasis of Khorezm, specifically in the walled town of Khiva, (pronounced Hever), a city, just back across the border in Uzbekistan, with a gloomy history of cruel Khan rulers and slavery, but today conforming to one’s image of a typical ancient city somewhere in central Asia: high sand-coloured walls, around and within the city, shimmering domes of turquoise, minarets, small hotels converted from merchants’ houses, kids playing games on the street with discarded water-bottle tops, thronging noisy crowds buying trinkets, tiles, paintings, fur hats for next winter, hand-painted chess-sets, jewellery and gold, just as you feel life has always been here.

  A fine ending to the fairy-tale magic of exotic Asia remembered from Ali Baba and 1,001 Nights of our childhood reading.

  Chapter 24

  Montenegro and Croatia

  It had been our intention to board ex-president Tito of Yugoslavia’s train on a rare trip from Bar in Montenegro to Belgrade in Serbia in September but sadly the track has been severely damaged in last winter’s floods, so we have had to cancel that part of the trip. The train is taken out of mothballs only a few times a year as, like the rest of us, it is getting on in years and needs to be looked after in old age.

  With the trip already emasculated with the train sector cancelled, worse was to come as we were forced to also drop the side-trip to Serbia too when my wife was taken ill with food poisoning on the boat, but I am getting ahead of myself.

  We had hoped to pick up our gulet, a two-masted wooden sailing vessel, in Kotor, Montenegro, after a couple of days exploring Kotor Bay and surrounding area, including the old walled town of Budva Stari Grad, which included the largest concentration of jewellery shops per square yard I have ever come across. Not many corner shops or other useful outlets though.

  But the previous week’s storms had marooned our boat north of Dubrovnik in Croatia which dramatically altered our planned itinerary: instead of five days in Montenegro and two in Croatian waters, it would be only three stops in Montenegro and four in Croatia.

  We reached our gulet in darkness about 9 pm, not moored alongside a convenient quay but a tender trip away in an isolated bay for a late chilly outside meal on board once we had been instructed to remove our footwear in case we scuffed the deck. Our first chance to meet our captor (not a typo) for the week, Admiralissimo Goran (or Captain Hook as we called him because of his pet parrot called Charlie), the tyrant of the Croatian seas (the captain, not the parrot). I am pretty sure, if my Serbo-Croat vocab serves me well, that he muttered ‘ah ha Jakov lad’ to a crew member more than once.

  Our schedule was designed to meet the captain’s every need: afternoon naps after exhausting one or two hours sailing, his timetable for permission to go ashore, sometimes seven or eight of us balanced on the ship’s rubber dinghy in the pitch dark, (though at other times, he seemed to whip off alone at high speed in the dinghy for mysterious landside assignations), minimal cruising, remote anchoring (to minimise mooring fees?), no daily briefings, no map displays, no conversation and certainly no dining at the captain’s table. He ate in splendid isolation tended by the ship’s staff, meals bearing no similarity to his passengers’ rations.

  A request for access to Wi-Fi was met with ‘what do you need that for?’, not ‘certainly’, nor ‘I’m sorry we don’t have Wi-Fi’. I think we’ll head for northeast Africa next year: I’m sure we’ll get better treatment from Somali pirates.

  What did we actually see from the list of stops in the brochure? Stunning walled towns? Vibrant cultural villages, waterfront restaurants, hidden coves? Anchored out in remote coves for hours on end, yes, but not a lot more for three days till we reached Dubrovnik, but as we were obliged to eat dinner on board that night at least four miles from the city, there was no opportunity for perusing the city’s wide choice of romantic evening restaurants and cafés as the sun set.

  Two features, however, were excellent: the weather and the company, which for a few days included, would you believe, a honeymoon couple. Quite why two young things would think being cooped up with a load of old farts in fairly cramped quarters with limited soundproofing would make an ideal honeymoon venue, I have no idea.

  It was all very disappointing after our two past cruises in Croatia on a larger vessel which moored every night in town, allowing easy access at times of our choosing, sightseeing and a good balance between sailing, swimming and excursions. Caveat emptor.

  Chapter 25

  Bosnia Herzegovina

  The twentieth century started and ended badly in Sarajevo, from the shooting of crown prince Franz Ferdinand of Austria on June 28th 1914 to the 1,425-day siege of the city by Bosnian Serbs from 1992 to 1995, reducing the population to starvation, raw winters and a constant risk of death. They ended up burning floorboards, car tyres and even books as well as any tree still standing to fight off the bitter winter climate. The landmarks of this period are everywhere, from war-damaged buildings to vast cemeteries covering whole hillsides in every direction.

  But despite all, the residents of the city were a resourceful lot and eventually found a way during the Bosnian war to relieve the city, as the airfield was only open to UN personnel, by building an 800-metre tunnel under the airport runway in order to import food, livestock and other provisions. Conditions were appalling over a period of four months 24 hours a day carrying foodstuffs in forty-kilo backpacks, having to bend over double, wading in water and with limited oxygen supplies. At least, it was preferable to being shot by hilltop snipers. Over 200 were killed in this way before the tunnel was finished.

  Today the city is still largely Muslim (it was the northern European outpost of the Ottoman empire in the fifteenth century) as it has always been but citizens of Muslim, Orthodox and Christian faiths are all trying to reconcile their differences in the interests of the community as a whole, but corruption, unemployment and poor economic conditions suggest that this volcano may yet again one day re-erupt.

  The city is not without charm especially in the old town, single story wooden buildings with tiled roofs, small park areas, shady trees and numerous mosques are reminiscent, not unsurprisingly, of Istanbul. An overwhelming number of busy coffee shops, (mainly men of course, though in the evenings girls join them, many smoking hookahs), ATM machines, mobile phone shops, cafés, jewellery shops, brassware and tourist tat emporia. Thronging street crowds are made up of small groups of Japanese tourists, UN staff, local militia in camouflage fatigues without weapons, pomegranate juice vendors, and young women often smartly dressed and surprisingly tall as are the young men. Smoking, even in restaurants, is common, probably reflecting the fact that cigarettes were used instead of army pay and generally as currency during the blockade in the 1990s. One young fellow must have been almost seven feet tall making me, at 6:3 inches feel short, which makes a change.

  Outside the old town architectural interest is rather less in evidence and the trams and buses are the most antiquated I have ever come across. You have to be aware whether you are in a Muslim area or not when it comes to liquid refreshment; alcohol is, of course, not served in the Muslim areas and so logically you start your evening with a drink in one area and end up in the other for a coffee.

  And so, at last, we embarked on our Assassination Tour, with, we were promised, the best guide in the business, fresh from his day off, and so he proved to be. Mohammed was a mine of information providing a detailed geopolitical background to the events in 1914, starting with Balkan history in the thirteenth century, through the long Ottoman period and the purchase of Bosnia from Turkey by Austria following the Berlin Treaty of 1878 when the European super powers carved up the world between them and inadvertently sowed the seeds of the Great War.

  We were fortunate to have the guide to ourselves, which made it a very personal experience to follow in the steps of those parties involved in the events of 1914: the route taken by the Archduke and his pregnant commoner wife, the place where one of the seven Bosnian Serb extremists threw the grenade which failed to kill the royal party, where the other extremists were positioned on the route and, of course, the location where the fateful shots were fired by Gavrilo Princip when the royal driver took a wrong turn and provided, inadvertently an ideal opportunity for assassination.

  As ever, it is the little details that bring to life the events of the past: in no particular order, the thoughtless construction of a brewery by Austria in 1864 right next to a mosque, the lack of economic development and lack of exposure to the impact of technological development under Ottoman rule which meant that the arrival of motorised public transport and trams under Austrian rule was considered the work of Satan, that passengers then removed their shoes on entering a tram to ‘keep it nice’ for later passengers, that the Archduke was not the Austrian emperor’s son but his nephew and that Franz Joseph was perhaps not as mindful of the risks and danger in sending him to Sarajevo as he might have been and so on. The Archduke himself seemed to feel himself immune from danger, even after the first grenade attack, carrying on regardless with the formalities and enjoying the adulation of the waving crowds, foolhardy in the extreme with hindsight, though as mentioned at the beginning, if the shots had failed here, it was probably only a matter of time before the tinderbox of European power politics had blown up at some other moment. Parallels with events today?