First published in the Financial Times on Saturday 21 May, 2011.

It is like a trip back to scout camp: the smell of weak coffee and detergent, the draughty iron sheds and barrack-room customer service. Arriving at Mount Pleasant Airport, the British military airbase, isn’t the warmest of welcomes but the Falklands are not for the average tourist.

Most visitors to the archipelago in the south Atlantic leave their cruise ships just long enough for tea and a piece of cake. A few spend a bit longer to experience an unlikely slice of British culture in the far southern hemisphere. But all are wowed by the flora and fauna. These blustery, empty islands, all 700 of them, are a veritable ark of sub-Antarctic life, boasting five species of penguins, 220 species of bird, 2,000 elephant seals and hundreds of Commerson’s dolphins, playfully escorting seagoing vessels. With few land-based predators, Falklands wildlife makes a noisy and absorbing spectacle, as unconcerned with the trickle of tourists as they are with the 2,500 kelpers (as locals are called) living among them.

The best way to see the local wildlife, and to explore the Falklands, is to go island-hopping, not by yacht, but using the tiny aircraft run by the Falkland Islands Government Air Service (Figas). These aircraft land on beaches and grassy airstrips and provide an indispensable link between remote farming communities and the capital, Port Stanley. My trip involves a circuit of the outlying islands, staying as a guest of the farmers. After a day or two, I fly on to the next, to find my new host waiting beside the airstrip in a Land Rover.

At Mount Pleasant, Terence McPhee, my first host, throws my kit into the back of his Land Rover and hits the gravel road to his farm in San Carlos, my first stop in “camp” (as everywhere outside Stanley is called). The landscape is bleakly inspiring, a Shetland-like expanse of tawny grasses that undulate without end. The only trees are a pair of cypresses planted outside his farmhouse, teased into a near right-angle by the unrelenting gusts. I’ll never forget McPhee’s warning: “You’ve got to park your car properly or else the wind will blow the door off.”

San Carlos Water, codenamed Blue Beach, was the main bridgehead for the British taskforce, which landed on the islands on May 21 1982 during the Falklands war: a lonely spot these days, where small waves lap towards the jetty in an almost Technicolour ultramarine. McPhee’s wife Sheila serves me a mountain of local mutton and organic vegetables from their garden. “If they hadn’t been so greedy, the Argentines would have had us by now,” she says, echoing the widely held belief that the UK government was trying to wash its hands of the Falklands in the years before the war. “All it had to do was wait.”

Right now there’s plenty more to think about than the conflict. Two events have revolutionised life here: fishing licences – the mainstay of the economy after taking over from sheep farming in 1987 – and now oil. Though everyone’s tight-lipped about it (including the local government, which insists the future lies in tourism), it seems there may be commercially viable reserves of crude oil.

My first hop is to Pebble Island, a large tract off the north coast of West Falkland, known for the translucent pebbles on its beaches. As I gaze from the air at these green expanses spread over an area the size of Wales, I am struck more than ever by the pioneering spirit of the 300 people who have chosen the camp life, living in settlements of one or two, running enormous farms on a quad-bike or from the saddle. “What would I want in Stanley?” one woman asks me on Saunders Island. It is a stoicism of a pre-internet age.

On Pebble Island, I know the penguins are near because I can smell them: the fishy miasma of a thousand rockhoppers, crowding on the edge of a cliff face. These fearless, bowling-pin sized birds have glided in from the sea, clawed their way up sheer rocks and have nested together in a vast gaggle of black-and-white baubles, grunting and squeaking like a broken cello. Unlike the more cautious gentoo and magellanic penguins, rockhoppers are unfazed by gaping visitors.

Another endlessly watchable animal is the elephant seal. Sea Lion Island, famous for the sinking of HMS Sheffield in its waters, boasts the largest waddle of seals in the archipelago. I arrive on this flat, grassy island with two war veterans and we make straight for the beaches where the seals bask. We take our places amid heaps of coiled orange kelp, like rubbery monster entrails. Just a few feet away lie nine neckless torpedoes of blubber, their skin nicked and stretch-marked, their moist black eyes flashing. Every so often an adult male elevates its giant proboscis and whispers to its harem with a throaty gurgle. Misjudging his distance, one veteran steps too close. With more agility than you’d think possible for an animal with no visible bones, the two tonner shoots instantly into a perpendicular position, poised to knock him down in a second. We all back away to the Land Rover.

These thriving penguin and seal colonies were on the verge of extinction at the end of the 19th century. Eagerly sought for their blubber, each penguin was said to render a pint of oil. They were eaten, too. According to Recipes for an Antarctic Cook (1959), “the meat of young shags, seals and penguins makes excellent eating but, in the natural state, it is rather too highly flavoured to be palatable”. The writer recommends adding Bisto gravy.

The bird that really takes me off my guard is the striated caracara. A scavenger of extreme rarity in Scotland, this falcon-like animal abounds on Carcass Island, a breathtaking little island in the far north-west of the archipelago. “The cawing drives you a bit potty but you get used to it,” says Robin McGill, in his languorous Falklands burr (somewhere between Australia and Somerset), as he drives me from the airstrip.

So large and powerful, caracaras remind me a bit of the roc of Sinbad fame, snatching objets trouvés in its powerful talons. Later I only just stop one from flying away with my clothes as I emerge from an ill-advised dip in the bay.

Predictably, the whole of Carcass Island teems with life: rock cormorants that swim as expertly as they fly; striped Magellanic penguins scurrying to their burrows at the first sound of feet; gentoo penguins, basking on their drum-shaped front bellies. Being free of rats and cats, Carcass is also a haven for small birds, such as the feather-ball shaped Cobb’s wren, which hops around the tussock grass with its sabre-like beak.

They don’t eat penguins or seals these days but islanders are proud of their food self-sufficiency. Walk on the windswept plains and you’re surrounded by edible plants, from wild celery and scurvy grass to the bushes of diddle-dee berries, a bittersweet species of crowberry used to make jam, and teaberries, which taste like a cross between mulberries and junipers, and are used to flavour teacakes. “Smoko”, or the “tea break”, is taken seriously here, in the English countryside manner.

I arrive in Port Stanley half expecting a yawning megapolis from the way the outlying islanders talk about it but I suddenly understand all the tourist talk of a “relic of a bygone England”. It has swept streets and shining cottages, sweet shops and red telephone boxes. Pubs offer darts and pints of bitter. Most striking of all is Jubilee Villas, a terrace with double-fronted bay-windows (complete with green corrugated-iron roof), built to commemorate Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee in 1887. It must once have seemed rather out of place in this impoverished rural community. But, perhaps, not for much longer.

There is a feeling of change in the air. Contract workers fill the pubs, prices are soaring, and developments are springing up in anticipation of the boom. Everybody’s talking about oil. If it really does come on stream, there will be little “bygone” about Stanley. Let’s hope the penguins remain unfazed.

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First published in The Guardian, Saturday 21 May 2011.

Two young guards stood astride the entrance of the presidential palace in São Tomé town, resplendent in white gaiters and BMX-style helmets. They stepped forward in unison, clapped their rifles to their shoulders, caught each other’s eye, and collapsed into laughter. They didn’t cut very convincing figures as guards, but then military pomp seems a bit superfluous in São Tomé and Príncipe, arguably Africa’s most peaceful country.

This twin-island nation tucked in the Gulf of Guinea, off Africa’s Atlantic coast, seems to be a secret largely confined to purveyors of cocoa – São Toméan chocolate graces the shelves of Fortnum & Mason – and naturalists, who flock here for its rare birds and butterflies. But any visitor to Africa’s second-smallest country would be bewitched by its vivid natural beauty, dilapidated architectural grandeur and disarmingly friendly people.

São Toméans’ renowned “ease of being” is enshrined in the local watchword, leve-leve, meaning something like “easy, easy” – which they say when you try to hurry things along. In this informal island culture, more Caribbean than African, where fruit flops off the trees and the sea is jumping with fish, the question always seems to be, “What’s the rush?”

Watching Príncipe from the plane was like preparing to enter an ancient world: extinct volcanoes, lush forest. Bom Bom Island Resort, on an islet off Príncipe, has 21 luxury bungalows around pristine, forest-lined beaches. Between lunches of grilled red snapper on the jetty, I passed my days snorkelling amid shoals of tigery-looking fish, kayaking to distant beaches and falling asleep to the ebb of the tide on my own private beach. I was in danger of setting up shop here, which was the fate of manager Dmitry:

“Príncipe, and São Tomé, appeared after volcanic activity,” he told me. “They were never part of the African continental plate. That’s why there are so many endemic birds and butterflies around. You get professors staying here for months. They can’t leave!”

The Portuguese were equally bewitched by these uninhabited islands when they arrived in around 1470, but were also quick to see their commercial potential, first sugar, then cocoa. The island became as famous for the inhuman conditions in which its slaves were kept as for the quality of its produce. The chocolate magnate William Cadbury was so shocked by his visit to the islands in 1908 that he boycotted the import of the bean on humanitarian grounds a year later.

Most of the cacao roças (plantations) have been reclaimed by nature since independence in 1975, but a handful still function as cocoa farms (the crop still accounts for 80% of the country’s exports), and are a fascinating record of the country’s history. At one time all roças were self-sufficient, with their own hospitals, and a railway to transport the cocoa to port.

My guide and I hopped on Bom Bom’s quad bikes and set off for nearby Roça Belmonte. We clucked along winding forest roads, past distinctive box-like huts, brightly painted on high stilts, and through Santo António, the island’s main town, where pink-pastel buildings seemed to peel in the glare of the Pico do Príncipe, the island’s highest mountain (948m).

At Roça Belmonte, it was as if the Portuguese had dropped everything and hurried away when independence came. Past the turreted entrance gate, the old schoolroom still bore a blackboard, the image of a horse and the word cavalo (horse) written in old-fashioned cursive chalk.

The largest of the roças are over on São Tomé island. Driving up the wide boulevards of Roça Agostinho Neto, you’re surrounded by the elaborate workings of the plantation economy, with hospitals, warehouses and offices that at one time processed huge amounts cocoa, coffee and copra (coconut kernel). A small boy handed me a cacao pod to try. He cracked it in two, to reveal the sweet, white, gooey flesh of the seeds, which I snacked on until my mouth turned purple.

Roça Agua Izé, on the coast road south of São Tomé town, is a compellingly tumble-down roça. With its throwback warehouses and narrow-gauge railway, the plantation just about shudders along. “Cacao is a good crop, but it can be a real headache if the rains don’t come,” sighed the manager, leaning on a sack of beans. “And this railway hasn’t run in 18 years.”

One roça owner had a radical response to plantation heritage. João Carlos Silva lives in the village of São João dos Angolares, home of the Angolar people (a “maroon” community descended from runaway slaves, with their own language, N’gola). He has restored Roça São João to its original airy charm and, with his cooking school, dance classes and eco-tourism projects, he has also created a renowned centre of São Toméan culture. But he is still best known outside the island for his infectiously enthusiastic cooking show, Na Roça com os Tachos – In the Roça with the Pots – on RTP Africa TV.

We sat on the veranda, nibbling spiced breadfruit fritters and sipping passionfruit juice. “My father was an administrator in the 1960s and stayed on after independence,” he said, “so the blood of the roça is in my veins. “Centuries of slavery have contributed to a national low self-esteem. Yet the country has so much to be proud of.”

The islands are almost completely forested: Obô national park – with areas on both Príncipe and São Tomé – covers 30% of the islands, and boasts 28 endemic species of bird out of 120 recorded here, rare tree ferns, orchids and the giant begonia. Tough walkers attempt the volcanic finger-like picos. I opted for a gentler hike in virgin forest in the heart of Obô, through Bom Sucesso botanical garden up to a large volcanic crater called Lagoa Amélia.

Clad in Barbour jacket and wellies, Francisco, my guide, wielded a fearsome machete. He led me through mosses, massive ferns and vast tree trunks: “The only thing to worry about here is the cobra preta, which is deadly.”

“But it slides away when it hears footsteps, right?” I suggested.

He made no reply, but hiked on, lopping off ferns with a soft ping of metal. Occasionally he would stop to point at plants. “This one,” he chortled, “you grind up and mix with honey, for when you’re on a date and need a – you know – pick me up.”

São Tomé island is a touch more worldly than Príncipe, but it still preserves a slow pace of life. The city has the charm of a colonial metropolis on the long road of decay, with seemingly little repaired since the Portuguese era. Stately boulevards flanked with walnut trees are cracked and split, pastel facades are rough with age and humidity, and life seems to roll by without the pressure of time – safe perhaps in the shadow of the imposing 16th-century fortress of São Sebastião.

By contrast, the centre of town, with its brightly coloured buildings, is alive with chatter. The mercado grande bustles with trade; hefty women flog tuna and sailfish, limes and mountains of chillies and okra, swigging palm wine from old Sagres bottles.

Like in all Africa’s former Portuguese colonies, there is a profusion of pastelarias, where you can eat custard tarts (pasteis de nata) and, best of all, açucarinhas, spirals of fudge and coconut pulp. And when you’ve had your last chocolate liquor at Café e Companhia (the town’s best cafe bar), and the street lights have fizzled out, it’s still safe to wander by the beachfront to suck in the sea air.

You don’t have to be a honeymooner to fly to São Tomé and Príncipe (although they’ve guarded the secret well), or a naturalist, or a chocolatier, but it does pay to leave your watch behind, and forget all sense of time.

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‘Asia Overland: Tales of Travel on the Trans-Siberian and Silk Road’, by Bijan Omrani, Odyssey Publications, 2010

Attempts to cloister East from West (“and ne’er the twain shall meet”) are quite absurd, says Bijan Omrani in Asia Overland: Tales of Travel on the Trans-Siberian & Silk Road, a hugely entertaining guide to the continent. For Asia has forever been in cultural flow, ebbing along the troika and camel tracks that spread from Moscow to Beijing.

One of the joys of reading this weighty book is to plot your trip in the footsteps of the characters that fill its pages, such as Captain Richard Chancellor, shipwrecked off Archangel and entertained by Ivan the Terrible; journalist Peter Fleming, who crossed war-ravaged Xinjiang by camel; and the wonderfully plucky Annette Meakin with her aged mother, the first English women known to have travelled the Trans-Siberian in 1900, marvelling at their cabin´s all new electric reading light.Much of the literature from which Omrani draws is sprinkled with espionage.

But if the Great Game encouraged deceit in travel, some visitors simply enjoyed dressing up: Robert Byron rubbed his face with burnt cork to gain entry to the tomb of Gawhar Shad in Herat in the mid 1930s, and the headstrong  Julia Pardoe in the 1820s was so intrigued to see the interior of Hagia Sofia in Istanbul, she darkened her blonde eyebrows and smothered herself in an oversize pelisse.

The historical and geographical scope of the book is vast and the sheer variety of peoples, customs and anecdotes can be dizzying. But then the distances astonished even locals. Anton Chekhov, riding the newly built Trans-Siberian in the 1890s would comment on the never-ending larch, spruce and pine forest: “over the first 24 hours you pay no attention to it, at the second and third day you are full of wonderment, and by the fourth and fifth you experience the sensation that you will never manage to emerge from this green monster.”The arrival of train travel to Asia may have aroused considerable suspicion – in Russia among the vodka-soaked tarantass-drivers going out of business, and in China because the train disturbed the repose of the ancestors and upset the Feng Shui of their tombs – but one forgets how international trade was nothing new by the 19th century: travellers enlivened dull dishes with British ketchup bought in eastern Siberia, and there was already a Thomas Cook guide to China by 1917.

Asia Overland is richly researched and organized, and the choice of photography inspiring. However, given the online resources and practical guidance at the end of the book, I wondered why Omrani´s travellers´accounts stopped at the inter-war years, as a few modern tales might have brought it up to date. Nevertheless, Asia Overland is a fine addition to the travel trunk, and a warm inspiration to anyone looking to offset their carbon footprint.

First published in the Guardian, 23 October 2010

Alexander the Great crossed the raging Oxus on stuffed animals’ hides; Indiana Jones hacked off a string bridge and swung over a croc-infested gorge. But for winter sports freaks jaded with all the known adrenaline-inducers, here’s a new one: Bun-J-Ride, a devilish mid-air experience straddling an Alpine river, every bit as thrilling as skiing and bungee jumping.

Bun-J-Ride is the invention of veteran bungee enthusiast Jean-François Michelin. Having supervised tens of thousands of jumps in Normandy, New Zealand and Indonesia, the Doctor of Near Death has brought his invention to the near-comatose French village of Saint-Jean-de-Sixt, a neighbour of the ski hubs of Grand Bornand and La Clusaz in the Haute-Savoie region of France.

Michelin and his Bun-J-Riders erected a ramp 40m above the freezing river and then strung twin cables to the opposite bank. They strapped on rubber bungees that slide along the cables, and opened their first Bun-J-Ride in May 2009. At €65 a go, the idea is that you ski, sled or cycle down a 28m-long ramp and are hurled in to the open air to fly, and then slide gently to the other side. The point, of course, is the near-death illusion, which even for the hardest stomachs, doesn’t disappoint.

I’ve never managed to dispel a growing unease in the run-up to simulated suicide, as they strap you in (“don’t they know I’m about to die?”). I seek reassurance from Michelin: “Anything I need to know before I go?”

“Non,” is all I get back in reply.

‘Inside the Kingdom: Kings, Clerics, Modernists, Terrorists and the Struggle for Saudi Arabia’, by Robert Lacey, Arrow, 2010.

Following on from his bestselling The Kingdom: Arabia and the House of Sa’ud, published 30 years ago, royal biographer and historian Robert Lacey now relates the dramatic everything that came after: the growth of terrorism, the souring of the US-Saudi relationship and the kingdom’s agonising engagement with the modern world.

The society that leaps from these pages is repressive to an almost unimaginable degree. Daily life is a cocktail of cane-wielding religious police, a restless and angry youth, volleys of death threats for dogma-defying teachers, and the continuing intolerance of women drivers – a shibboleth of western fascination for this secretive kingdom, and a misleading one: Bedouin women have long driven around the desert, but the breach of this convention (it’s not a law) by urban women still leads to arrest and ostracism.

Lacey also offers a brilliant glimpse into the delicate machinery of government, and the constant tension between ‘ulema (religious establishment) and monarchy. In contrast to the office-holding ayatollahs in Iran, where the clergy seized power in 1979, the Saudi ‘ulema has always shown a “reflexive loyalty” to monarchy. But their persistent demands for piety in the 70s and 80s would hopelessly skew the balance of power.

The turning point was the hijacking of the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979, a violent protest at the country’s perceived ungodliness, which struck at Islam’s holiest sanctuary. The answer, King Khaled decided under clerical pressure, would be more religion. Thereafter laws were tightened, school curriculums shrank to little more than religious instruction, and “the petrodollar,” says Lacey, “went pious”.

The result was a crop of Islamic extremists who dreamed of messianic purity and the path of international violence to achieve it. One such was Osama bin Laden, the soft-spoken head of the eponymous conglomerate (the Saudi distributor of Snapple) whose treasonous rhetoric would keep him in exile from 1994. Lacey underlines the bewilderment felt when al-Qaida finally struck US soil in 2001, and both governments’ protests that the US-Saudi relationship had nothing to do with it.

“After Allah, we trust the United States,” said King Faisal in 1962 of a marriage that would prove fatally contradictory. American funding of jihadists in Afghanistan in the 80s, an alliance with the House of Saud, and visceral support for Israel at the expense of Arabs would, says Lacey, “provoke more death and destruction in the mainland United States than 45 years of cold war”.

This is essential reading for anyone with a passing interest in Saudi Arabia.

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We [Daunt Books] are holding a special free event to celebrate the shortlisted entries for this year’s Dolman Travel Book of the Year Award. The shortlisted books include William Blacker’s Along the Enchanted Way, Susan Richards’ Lost and Found in Russia, Daniel Metcalfe’s Out of Steppe and Horatio Clare’s A Single Swallow. Each author will speak briefly about their book and it will be an opportunity to meet them, have books signed and of course enjoy a glass or two of wine.

Tickets to this event are free.

Link to Daunt Books

First published in the Guardian, 19 June 2010

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In the Alpine region of Tyrol, there’s a saying – “Tell me what you eat and I’ll tell you who you are” – which dates back to the days when feuding barons savoured speck and dumplings, leaving their peasantry to chew on rough Schüttelbrot (crispbread).

Times have changed. South Tyrol, the predominantly German-speaking region of northern Italy, is now one of the continent’s prime fine dining spots. It boasts 18 Michelin stars, more than any other Italian province. By way of comparison, the Los Angeles area, with a population 15 times greater, can manage only 24.

Tyrol formed the Alpine flank of the Habsburg empire until 1918, when Italy annexed its southern half. It was renamed Alto Adige, raised to “autonomous region” level, and its capital, Bolzano, given a robustly Italo-Fascist makeover. It is here in Südtirol – as the German-speaking locals still call it – that the food really sparkles, a region that combines an Alpine love of starch (watch out for Knödeln, or dumplings) with the fruit strudels of the Viennese drawing room, and all the spices of the local Lagrein and Gewürtztraminer grapes.

South Tyroleans are serious about cheese too. My first stop was at one of the region’s leading lights, Degust, a small independent cheese affinatore in the village of Varna in Val d’Isarco. Since 1995, Edith and Hansi Baumgartner have been working out of a Mussolini-era bunker that provides perfect refining conditions, often adding figs, cherries, and even seaweed for flavour.

Edith appeared, half-obscured by ribboned boxes of cheeses with blueberry chutney and mandarin mustard. “South Tyrol has wonderful cows and milk but the cheese was a disaster, so we started this micro-refinery. There was really nothing else around,” she explained, once I was happily nibbling on some Gruyère with a glass of dark muscatel. Edith handed me one of her favourites, a bittersweet blue cheese called Golden Gel, made at an altitude of 1,800m. “It was matured for six months in the bunker,” she confided, “another month in basins of sweet grapes, and then wrapped in hay for a further month.”

Edith’s brother-in-law Karl Baumgartner is head chef at the Michelin-starred Schöneck restaurant and shares her almost obsessive passion for quality ingredients. Winding up to the tiny village of Falzes, I passed lonely hayricks that stood on snow-covered meadows, before finally reaching Schöneck. It was more than worth the drive. After a round of delectable starters – steak tartare with white truffle shavings and some succulent gnocchi, I had capretto (milk-fed goat) and winter vegetables in a herb sauce, with a punchy Pinot Nero Burgum Novum Castelfeder 2006. Then Baumgartner arrived with a glint in his eye and an oozy chocolate tart with a shapely clod of beige ice-cream. It slipped down like a dream before I felt a sudden kick in the larynx. “You like it?” beamed the chef, before revealing that it was derived from vanilla-flavoured pipe tobacco.

Fine dining was all very well but I still wanted to know what constituted Tyrolean home cooking. And what about the speakers of Ladin, a minority language not so different from Swiss Romansh, spoken by 40,000 in the Gherdëina and Badia valleys of the south-east of the region? What did they eat? Refreshed by Baumgartner’s mountain flowers herbal tea, I headed to the skiing heartland of Badia to find out.

In the winding mountain roads outside Pedraces, a modest wooden farmhouse finally appeared from the darkness. With no English-speaking staff, and a fixed-course menu written entirely in Ladin, the family-run Maso Runch makes few overtures to its customers. I was surprised to discover that it is, however, one of the region’s most popular restaurants, often booked for weeks in advance. It was as homely as it got: waitresses in faux-peasant outfits swished around with spinach Knödeln, great pink sides of pork, bowls full of juniper-flavoured sauerkraut, and carafes of Lagrein – a dark local red – all served in such a hurry there was no time for a humble Ladin bun apetit. The food was hearty and delicious.

Restored by the Hotel Fanes spa in the nearby mountain village of San Cassiano, I prepared for my fourth and final sample of Tyrolean cuisine. This was at the upmarket Rosa Alpina hotel, frequented by the likes of George Clooney and Prince Albert of Monaco, and home to St Hubertus, a double Michelin-starred restaurant run by renowned chef Norbert Niederkofler.

St Hubertus is the Mont Blanc of South Tyrolean fine dining, though eating there sometimes feels like scaling the mountain. Settled behind a starched tablecloth in a wood panelled dining room, I paced myself through course after wine-paired course (not to mention several amuse-bouches), all twiddled, twisted and twined to perfection. Each offering dazzled, arriving like the perfect little present you’d always wanted but never thought to ask for: pork belly with smoked potato purée, Kaluga Amur caviar and champagne sauce; buckwheat ravioli of buffalo milk ricotta with squid and cream of green beans. My head swam, my taste buds danced.

But by the time the chocolate millefeuille arrived eight courses later, the sommelier ever present, the maître-d’ always watchful, and everything so relentlessly excellent, I wished for a brief moment that I was back in the Maso Runch being largely ignored. Ah well, perhaps that old proverb was right …

Daniel Metcalfe’s ‘Out of Steppe: The Lost Peoples of Central Asia’ (Arrow) has been shortlisted for this year’s Dolman travel book of the year

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see also livinginitaly.com

‘The Pindar Diamond’,  by Katie Hickman, Bloomsbury, 2010

It is Venice, 1604, a city of dead ends and alleyways, crumbling stucco and private ridotti where fortunes are lost over games of primero. It is a place of courtesans, spies and ex-concubines who live out their best years in island nunneries.

Then one sister upsets the apple cart. Suor Annetta has brought to Venice a rare and valuable thing, a diamond so special it blesses the good and brings sfortuna to the bad. Once in the eye of an Indian idol in Golconda, it found its way to the Ottoman court, where Annetta wrenched it from the clenched fist of her dead mistress, the Sultan’s mother, in a vain attempt to bargain her friend Celia from captivity, before ending up in a convent herself.

News of the ‘Sultan Blue’ escapes, and the Levant Company – a band of rogues, traders and ‘intelligencers’ – will do anything to get their hands on it. These include Ambrose Jones, the vile collector of curios for his master’s cabinet; John Carew, the lusty, stone-eyed villain, who slips into convents by night, ‘churching’ the none-too-resistant sisters; and Paul Pindar, senior Company member and recovering gambling addict, whose lust for the diamond leads him to the ridotto of the mysterious Zuanne Memmo and his masked gamers, while he searches for clues of his lost love, abducted by a Turkish corsair.

Katie Hickman, best known for her Courtesans (2003), is strong on atmosphere. She paints a Venice you can visualise (gondolas, beaked masks and tarocchi cards), and even smell: the canal’s oily stench necessitates herb-filled nosegays and ‘cotton cambric drenched with attar of roses’. Clothing is wildly sumptuous. Noblewomen, whose cheeks glow with carmine, are dressed in pointed stomachers, and ‘outrageously high’ collars made from ‘stiffly starched point de Venise lace’ fanning out behind in ruffs like peacocks’ tails. She has clearly enjoyed the character of Constanza, the sharp-witted courtesan of advancing years, who is wise enough to hide her love for Pindar, as ‘desire for a man, or disgust, whatever is felt for him must never be shown, but must be concealed always, disguised behind the courtesan’s mask. On this rested everything.’

This is an enjoyable novel and the plot moves apace, though I couldn’t help wondering about the backgrounds of the male characters and why they seem to hate each other so much. There are moments too where the dialogue threatens to overwhelm a world that Hickman draws with considerable skill and delicious attention to detail.

‘A Winter in Arabia: A journey through Yemen’, by Freya Stark, I.B. Tauris, 2010.