It is almost dusk when I arrive at Amenoudji Kondji, a village of palm trees and mud-walled houses in southern Togo. The sound of drumming leads me to a courtyard, where a small crowd is gathering in front of a household shrine to Chango, the thunder god. Through the doorway of the shrine I can just glimpse the fetish; a crude earthen figure covered with straw, dripping with candle wax and palm wine.

As the drumming intensifies, the boys join in with maracas and the women begin to chant in a high-pitched wail. One by one, the women get up to dance, gently at first but then working themselves into a frenzy. A young mother goes into a trance, shaking her body so violently that her baby has to be snatched from her back for its own protection. Am I witnessing the effects of too much alcohol and the hypnotic beat of the drums, or is she, as the villagers believe, possessed by the spirits of their ancestors?

Voodoo and the spirit world are central features of everyday life in Togo and Benin. For some people, the word voodoo conjures up sinister images of black magic, witchcraft and sacrifice; for others, it is one of the most misunderstood religions on earth.

Voodoo originated in West Africa and was taken overseas by slaves, where it reappeared in different forms as far apart as Brazil, Cuba, Haiti and the US. In turn, it has spawned an entire Hollywood industry of nightmarish horror films, featuring zombies lurching through graveyards and sorcerers cursing their enemies by sticking pins into dolls.

If you want to see the real thing, however, you should head for the cradle of voodoo in southern Togo and Benin, where the religion is still practised alongside Christianity by the majority of the Ewe and Fon ethnic groups.

Like other African religions, voodoo is animist in nature, combining ancestor worship with a belief in various deities that inhabit both living and inanimate objects. Mountains, forests, stones and snakes can all have sacred powers, but so too can man-made fetishes built as shrines to the gods.

You see these fetishes wherever you go, though at first sight you might think they are nothing more than rotting, stinking mounds of earth. To keep the gods happy, animal sacrifices are made, which is why so many fetishes are decorated with chicken feathers and stained with blood, gin and palm wine.

My journey along the voodoo trail begins with a visit to the fetish market in the Togolese capital, Lomé. Spread out on rickety tables in a yard on the edge of the city, the market resembles an outdoor junk shop, until I look closely and see the macabre collection of animal parts on display.

This is where the witch doctors and faith healers come to buy the tools of their trade – monkey skulls, crocodile heads, ground chameleon, dried snakes, all known for their magical and medicinal powers. The heads of monkeys, for example, are boiled with herbs then ground and mixed with honey as an aid to intelligence and memory.

I retreat to a tent on the edge of the market, where I meet Calixte Ganyehessou. Ganyehessou is a shaven-headed voodoo priestess who hands me her business card, complete with cellphone number and a reference to her membership of the ‘occult sciences of African voodoo powers’. I sit on a wooden bench beside a fetish to Sagbata, the god of protection against smallpox and other diseases, as Ganyehessou places a charm around my neck and offers me a blessing for my journey. The amulet consists of a leather pouch studded with cowrie shells and filled with 41 different herbs – 41 being considered a sacred number in voodoo.

After a short session of bargaining, during which the gods have to be consulted, the charm is handed over in return for 3,000 West African francs ($7).

A dusty road through the mango trees leads to the village of Seko, where I have an appointment with Kpohinto, a famous guérisseur or traditional healer. I find him in the courtyard of the compound that he shares with his two wives and many children. Nearby are a motorbike, a fetish to the god Legba and a blackboard where the children have been practising their maths.

‘It took me 12 years to learn the wisdom of healing from my uncle,’ he says. ‘Now I can help to protect the villagers from mental illness, witchcraft and evil curses.’ He explains how he treats his patients using a combination of herbal remedies and voodoo power, after consulting the gods to determine the appropriate cure. ‘If an illness is natural, like malaria or a snake bite, it needs a natural solution,’ he says, ‘but if it has been caused by supernatural powers, then it needs voodoo to take it away.’

Crossing the border into Benin, I journey to Ouidah, the spiritual home of voodoo and home of the Hounon, the high priest of the voodoo religion. It is here each January that Benin celebrates National Voodoo Day, declared a public holiday by former president Soglo in 1996 after he was said to have been saved from death by miraculous voodoo powers.

Ouidah has a dark history as a notorious slave-trading post – a museum in the old Portuguese fort shows the chains in which slaves were bound before being put on ships bound for the Americas.

I follow the Slave Route from the old slave market in the centre of town to retrace the fatal journey of thousands of unfortunates. The route takes me down to the beach and the ‘point of no return’ from which the slave ships with their human cargo set sail. These days, the beach is one of the main attractions of Ouidah. At the nearby Jardin Brésilien I dine on Atlantic fish in tomato and pepper sauce with plantain, rice and chips, gazing out over the ocean through a forest of palm trees swaying above golden sand.

In the bad old days, one way of escaping capture was to build your home on water, hopefully out of reach of the marauding armies of slave-raiders. The result is the charming stilt village of Ganvié, constructed in the 18th century in the middle of Lake Nakoué by refugees fleeing slavery.

Today, it provides a refuge for travellers wanting to get away from it all for a couple of days. I take a boat across the lake and spend the night at Chez M, a thatched guesthouse standing above the water on stilts. The boats continue to glide past my window all night by the light of the full moon. Waking early I wander onto the terrace to watch Ganvié coming to life, with children collecting water by boat from the village pump and travelling to school on punts and pirogues.

Anyone who thinks the slave trade was purely a European phenomenon should pay a visit to Abomey. For 200 years until the arrival of French colonists, this was the capital of Dahomey, a bloodthirsty kingdom whose name struck fear into the hearts of all who entered it. The kings of Dahomey sustained themselves in power by voodoo, waging war on their neighbours, capturing slaves and exchanging them for guns with European traders.

Each new king built himself a royal palace, but only those of kings Ghezo (who ruled from 1818 to 1858) and Glélé (1858 to 1889) remain. They may have been turned into a museum and World Heritage site, but they still have the power to shock. Ghezo’s throne is mounted on the skulls of his enemies. Glélé had 41 of his wives buried alive in a mass grave beside his tomb.

The Pearl Temple, built by Glélé to house the spirit of his father, has walls built of mud mixed with the blood of 41 slaves. Nearby is the fetish house, which the king’s soldiers visited before their campaigns to make an offering to the gods and promise to bring back the severed heads of their enemies. If they failed in their promise, their own heads were forfeit.

Far from the voodoo heartlands of the south, the Somba people live in the Atakora mountains on the northern borders of Togo and Benin. These remote tribes were only ‘discovered’ by anthropologists in the 1950s, at which time they still went naked and hunted with bows and arrows. Yet long before this they had been known to the slave-raiders and had developed their remarkable houses for their own protection.

The Somba still live in these tatas, fortress-like mud dwellings resembling giant sandcastles with towers, turrets and walls. Outside the door of each house is a collection of phallic-shaped fetishes, representing the souls of departed animals and stinking of millet beer.

I spend my final days trekking among the Somba villages, through a landscape dotted with mango and baobab trees and fields of okra and yams. ‘The Somba are farmers,’ says Paul, my guide. ‘They grow millet and tomatoes and collect honey in clay pots. They are also hunters, killing antelope, gazelle and bush rats. Whenever they kill an animal, they build a fetish outside their house, then hang up the jawbone and pour blood on the fetish to appease the animal’s spirit.’

The Somba may not believe in voodoo, but it certainly feels like it. After a week in Togo and Benin, I was almost starting to believe it myself.

HOW TO GET THERE

Air France flies four times a week from Paris to Cotonou and three times a week from Paris to Lomé.www.airfrance.com Royal Air Maroc has connecting flights from London to Cotonou and Lomé via Casablanca. www.royalairmaroc.com

Take the tour

Independent tour operator Explore has a six-day Voodoo Villages tour to Togo and Benin departing in October. www.explore.co.uk

WHERE TO STAY

Hotel Ibis is a French-owned hotel on the beachfront in Lomé, with free shuttles from the airport. www.ibishotel.com

Artworks online

Gati Gallery offers a wide range of antiques and primitive art from Togo, Benin and neighbouring countries. www.gatigallery.co.uk

Find out more

Benin by Stuart Butler (Bradt, £14.99); Show me the Magic by Annie Caulfield (Viking Penguin, £7.99). Visitors should be respectful of voodoo ceremonies.

INSIDE AFRICA AIRS SATURDAY AT 18:30 AND 01:30; SUNDAY AT 15:00 (CET).

Paul McCartney is covered in ash. Next to him lie Sting, the Rolling Stones and Dire Straits, their faces smeared with the fossilising effects of dust and neglect. Scattered around the room are technical manuals, microphone stands and insulation padding. Along with this obsolete recording equipment there lies a small pile of papers containing sheet music and album sleeves of the work of these artists, the 1980s gloss on the sleeve of McCartney’s LP now as dry and crinkled as a papyrus scroll.

This is what remains of Beatles’ producer Sir George Martin’s AIR Studio, a luxurious recording facility, complete with adjoining villa and heated swimming pool that looks out onto the sparkling sea and the variegated greens of the Soufrière Hills.

Rock aristocracy swarmed here in the early 1980s to record in what was a halcyon time for this Lilliputian British overseas territory in the West Indies. The island had everything the world-weary jet set was looking for: a tiny fragment of verdant beauty with a strong Irish legacy (Montserrat’s first modern settlers were Catholics fleeing from persecution in nearby St Kitts and as a result of Oliver Cromwell’s regime in 17th-century England), inevitably friendly locals, and a near-perfect year-round climate. Nature has, since then, exacted a cruel and deadly blow to the ‘Emerald Island’ of the Caribbean.

The Soufrière Hills volcano, dormant for centuries, began rumbling in 1995, causing the capital city of Plymouth to be evacuated for a few months. It was on 25 June 1997, however, that it truly awoke, engulfing the southern half of the island with pyroclastic flows (currents of ash and rock that move at speeds of several hundred kilometers an hour), destroying the airport and killing 19 people.

The island’s demands to the UK for further aid money in the months following the eruption were met, though the fiscal package was gift wrapped with scorn by Claire Short, then British Minister for Overseas Development, who famously quipped: ‘They’ll be asking for golden elephants next,’ a statement that provoked huge rancour and is still remembered in the form of tiny elephant trinkets available at many of the island’s shops.

Today, vapour and steam pour out of the volcano like a continuously boiling kettle, with January 2007 seeing a partial collapse of the lava dome – a movement that led to millions tons of mud and ash travelling down the long evacuated Belham River Valley. Home to the island’s golf course, the valley is now a freeway-sized lahar of mud, six-metres deep and containing houses buried up to their rooftops.

Scientists at the Montserrat Volcano Observatory are adamant that any future volcanic activity would only damage the half of the island that is already out of bounds. Montserrat’s 4,000 remaining inhabitants, they say, are perfectly safe, as are any visitors – and, if you are willing to have an active volcano on your doorstep, the advantages of living here are myriad.

For starters, and not surprisingly, this is the cheapest place to buy property in the whole of the Caribbean (a four-bedroom villa with pool can be had for as little as $250,000) and the hills, dense as shag-pile carpet, provide a verdant backdrop. There is very little crime, resorts and casinos are unheard of, and the only reason car horns are used is to greet passing friends. The closest anything comes to ribald is in the tiny wooden shack bars (known as ‘rum shops’) on a Friday evening where you can find the likes of Gary Moore, owner of the Wide Awake bar in Salem village, sleeping on the bar counter as customers leave the correct money for their drinks by his head and help themselves. espite these charms, tourism – essential for an island where almost all light industry was destroyed and the best farmland lies fallow in the exclusion zone – is in deep trouble. Visitor numbers were down to a few thousand for the whole of 2006 and though Montserrat thrives off its reputation as ‘the Caribbean the way it used to be’, without the scorch marks of mass tourism, the perceived scare factor of the volcano along with startling ignorance of the situation has hobbled the island’s cash cow.

‘In Antigua people think we’re living in this hell hole where we need gas masks and can’t see our hands in front of our faces,’ says island taxi driver Charles. It is a sentiment echoed by bed and breakfast owner Shirley who speaks of a report on the US’s Weather Channel, which referred to the ‘uninhabited island of Montserrat’. The US Department of State recently released a statement advising Americans to ‘strongly consider the risks’ before holidaying there.

That risk clearly was not considered to apply to the thousands of Montserratians, though, who fled to the US after their homes and villages were destroyed. US authorities decided to revoke their ‘Temporary Protective Status’ visas, as the volcanic situation could no longer be considered temporary. With almost 100 people still living in shelters a decade after the first eruption on the island, the prospect of Montserrat having to cope with returning locals who have nowhere to live is still a threat. he lack of a ferry service from nearby Antigua means that tourists and peripatetic locals have no option but to attempt to grab an expensive seat on one of the 18-seater Twin Otters, the largest plane the new Gerald’s Airport’s 600-metre runway can accommodate.

The island’s tourism director, Ernestine Cassell, says she intends to resign her post and leave the island if the boat service is not restored. ‘Tourism as an industry will simply cease to exist if the island’s transport disaster is not solved,’ she says.

Allegations of governmental corruption plague the island with local newspaper the Montserrat Reporter running a column entitled Jus’ Wonderin’, essentially a list of gripes written anonymously by islanders with each allegation starting with the prefix ‘jus’ wonderin’. It generally contains vicious and defamatory statements against those in power.

‘You should see how bad it gets when it’s election time,’ says local forest ranger and tour guide James ‘Scriber’ Daley. Daley is one of the few Montserratians who returned to the island after a short spell in the UK following the total destruction of his village when it was hit by a lateral blast from the volcano in 1997.

‘Many people here feel that the NPLM [New People’s Liberation Movement, part of the coalition government led by Lowell Lewis] is corrupt and that they are paid far too much, but the UK has given us so much money that we are in danger of developing a mentality of dependency. We need to take responsibility for the fact that this island is not recovering quickly enough otherwise we will all continue to suffer.’

The problem, in the eyes of most islanders, is not that the British government has not given Montserrat enough money to rebuild and prosper – Foreign Office figures put the sum at close to $600m – it is that the money that has been sent has been swallowed up by ‘consultants’ or has simply disappeared. This is why, the many disgruntled islanders claim, Monts -errat is still relying on a crumbling temporary harbour at Little Bay that is incapable of docking even the tiniest of cruise ships.

The irony is that while the volcanic disruption increases the size of the island, the economy, along with the hopes for a future, continues to ebb away. It is great news for anyone seeking the ultimate West Indies hideaway, but a disaster for the 4,000 people who cling to the northern end of this island. Quiet for so long, it is not just the volcano that has become restless.

HOW TO GET THERE

British Airways flies from London to Antigua. From there you can continue your journey to Montserrat with Win Air www.ba.com www.fly-winair.com

More information

For more information on visiting Montserrat, including where to stay and what to do, go to www.visitmontserrat.com

Originally built as luxury homes by returning émigrés, the recently Unesco-listed towers of Kaiping were later enlisted for a more warlike purpose. Brandon Zatt reports. Photography by Timothy O’Rourke

She hangs a framed, black-and-white photograph of herself on the wall. ‘It’s to help me remember who I am,’ says 83-year-old Wu Dongjiu, widow of Situ Yao, who was killed in 1945 by Japanese troops. Wu was just 20 years old. They had been married for six months.

The sun beams into her one-room home through a gap in the roof, casting the stone patio in a shaft of light. The rest of her home is dark, save the shock of silver hair crowning her head. Somewhere above, a lone tower watches over her village of Xuan Qi Li. It is not the South Tower, where Situ Yao was captured, but it is one of the nearly 2,000 towers that bear witness to the extraordinary trials of the daughters and sons of Kaiping, a city in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong.

Kaiping’s watchtowers – diaolou in Mandarin – rise over the western reaches of the Pearl River delta. Built between the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Kaiping émigrés returning from overseas, the towers exhibit a harmony of Chinese and Western elements rarely matched today. From imposing military structures to opulent castles with their turrets in the clouds, they are as diverse as the dreams of émigrés returning home.

‘Some say Kaiping’s watchtowers are symbols of decadence,’ says Ms Zhou, assistant director of Kaiping’s largest watchtower cluster, Majianglong. ‘That’s wrong. Kaiping’s émigrés suffered a lot and struggled hard. The watchtowers are their history and culture and each one has a story to tell.’

The stories are harrowing and heartening, and now Kaiping is telling them to the world. For years, government leaders petitioned Unesco and academics published their findings, while locals spoke with journalists and overseas descendents stormed the blogosphere. In June 2007, their efforts paid off when a handful of watchtower clusters became the first Unesco World Heritage sites in the manufacturing-intensive Guangdong.

It is the week before Chinese New Year and the country is caught in the grip of the worst winter storm in 50 years. Bitter winds blast the tropical Pearl River delta, a hive of activity that is home to some 60 million people and is responsible for around 20 per cent of China’s GDP. But the Kaiping road leaves the belching factories behind, tunnelling west through a low mountain range and descending silent foothills to a broad flood plain.

At the confluence of the Tan and Cang rivers, the bustling city of Kaiping sprawls over a series of islets and channels thronged with old, wooden boats. Though no towers stand in the city any more, their gothic spires, Byzantine domed roofs and castle-like battlements soar over nearly every surrounding village and town.

At the tiny village of Gu Juan Bei Zha, 34-year-old Xie Chunzhi is returning home from the booming city of Shenzhen to celebrate the new year. Like so many young Chinese born in the countryside, he and his wife work in the city while his parents raise their grandson in the ancestral village.

Their village has two towers, one now used for storing hay, and an old villa. Inside, an old photograph of the owner, who returned from Canada to build this home in the 1920s, looks out over a roomful of dusty, hand-carved wooden furniture. His slick, pomaded hair contrasts with the surroundings of chaff sieves, rain-darkened walls and a millstone built into the floor. From the fourth-floor patio, Xie looks down at the village’s smooth, paved road and says: ‘The returnees built that road; they linked our village with the outside world. They came back and built schools.’ roubled times drove Kaiping’s émigrés overseas. As the Qing Dynasty (1644-1914) declined in the mid-19th century, uprising and rebellion, combined with mounting population pressure, spurred Kaiping natives to seek work in South-East Asia and the Americas. Departing from nearby ports Hong Kong and Macau, they hoped to return one day.

‘Most had lost their land; they had no other choice,’ says Situ Family Library director, Situ Liang. ‘Why else would they go dig mines and build railroads so far from home?’ Conditions for émigrés overseas were often dire, but many of the survivors returned with dreams of buying land, building a home and finding a spouse.

In a sense, the dream lives on today. ‘I hope to retire here,’ says Xie. ‘We pretty much all do. I’ve been in Shenzhen for 15 years but I still prefer Kaiping.’ From the patio, the village looks like an island in a rice-paddy sea, linked to other islands by dry, earth embankments and smooth, returnee-built roads.

But for Kaiping, things were not so smooth. As the Qing fell, émigrés returned to build a new China. They found chaos and unrest, exacerbated by opium addiction and gambling.

Exposed on the flood plain, Kaiping was ravaged by a typhoon in 1908, driving destitute villagers to banditry. The desperate outlaws targeted rich returnees and crime soared. Then, in 1923, villagers posted in an old Qing watchtower foiled a kidnapping attempt, galvanising Kaiping residents into a watchtower-building boom. Villages and families built towers for communal defence while the wealthy turned towers into dream homes, incorporating styles and materials gleaned overseas.

On a hilltop, surrounded by graves, the five-storey, reinforced-concrete, Unesco heritage-listed Fang Clan watchtower stands alone. Built to defend the region, its balconies, domed roof and spire conceal a deadly grace. Deep loopholes peer out from thick walls, once equipped with a searchlight, guns, generator and siren, all shipped back by family members overseas. inds whip the rain clouds on towards the nearby Zili Village. The name zili roughly means ‘do-it-yourself’ and, fittingly, the villagers continue building new tourist paths through the rain. ‘Becoming a World Heritage site is a source of pride,’ says resident Li Qiuyang. ‘Nobody ever came to visit before. Now, we’re fixing the place up and creating new jobs.’ Enterprising residents offer tourists home-style meals inside their watch-tower and villa kitchens.

Sandwiched between Baizu Mountain and the Tan River, Majianglong’s towers and villas poke out through lush bamboo thickets and banana tree groves. It is another area where Kaiping’s local government has been instrumental in promoting preservation and tourism. ‘Thank goodness for these towers,’ says a middle-aged local called Hu. ‘Kaiping’s Watchtower Office helped us fix-up our village. I renovated my home and they picked up the tab.’

In Majianglong, where the watch towers are also on Unesco’s list, incense smoke hangs fragrant and thick in the cold, damp air. Beneath a tent, men prepare food for a New Year’s feast.

And on the village’s stone edifices, block red Chinese characters, remnants of communist propaganda, fade in the rain as development redraws party lines.

On Sunday, villagers come to market in Chikan Town, where colonial-style row houses line the narrow lanes. Their square columns vault residential balconies out over street-level store fronts, full of lanterns, fireworks, auspicious door hangings and kumquat trees. The sun is out, breaking the storm for the first time all week.

In Chikan’s Situ Family Library, elderly director Situ Liang sits with his grandson. Scholarly, in a wool cap and oversized spectacles, he is responsible for promoting local culture and liaising with Situ clan members around the world. Across the street, on the Tan’s banks, he has erected a memorial to the Seven Martyrs of the South Tower. ‘We must learn history, not hatred,’ he says. ‘History teaches us to work together for a better future. We must seek out improvement for all.’

It is a tough lesson for the Situ clan. In June 1945, seven of their young men – including Situ Yao – rushed down the Tan to defend the strategic South Tower from advancing Japanese forces. Outnumbered and outgunned, they fought for seven days and nights, exhausting all supplies. They were captured, tried in their own library, executed, dismembered, hung from the banyan trees where the memorial stands today, and cast in the river.

‘Hatred won’t help,’ says Liang, who, with contributions from family members, is now expanding the memorial’s poetry garden. ‘We cannot allow grudges of the past to hurt us today. We must find a way to move forward for peace.’

Wu Dongjiu, Situ Yao’s widow, is the last survivor of the invasion in Chikan. Her village is near the shrapnel-scarred South Tower. ‘We have to help young people understand the chaos of war,’ she says, ‘to understand how hard it’s been just to reach today. This good life came from those hard times.’

HOW TO GET THERE

Kaiping can be reached by regular buses from Shenzhen, Zhuhai and Guangzhou. There are several buses a day and the trips take between two and three hours.

From Macau and Hong Kong you can take a boat or plane to Zhuhai, the gateway to Guangzhou Province. Alternatively, take a train from Hong Kong to cross the border to Shenzhen’s Lo Wu/ Luo Hu station.

Where to stay

For high-end accommodation, stay at the Everjoint Peninsula Hotel Kaiping; rooms from $60 upwards. Alternatively, directly across from Kaiping’s bus station is the budget business traveller’s choice, the Seven Continents Hotel, where clean, standard rooms go for around $28.

The watchtowers

Most watchtower sites are within a half-hour drive of downtown Kaiping. Private mini-buses can be hired for around $40 a day, though few drivers speak English. Most towers are accessible by public bus though some may require transfers and walking. For maps, info and English-speaking guides, ask your hotel concierge. All major sites charge admission except for Chikan Town.

Older than history, older than tradition, and twice as old as all of them put together.’ Such was American author Mark Twain’s comment on Varanasi. Yet there are clear signs advanced age is creeping up on this ancient north Indian city. This is the eternal abode of Lord Shiva, whose spellbinding riverfront of temples and palaces – which line six kilometres of ghats, the steps by a river where Hindu funeral pyres are lit – is coming under increasing pressure from modern development and creeping dereliction.

I have made many trips to Varanasi and I never fail to be captivated by the place. There is no greater cultural or architectural spectacle in India. The rituals and customs of Hinduism’s most spiritual city, many of them based around Mother Ganga, the River Ganges, are seemingly as old as time.

Days begin with sunrise scything through a milky morning light and thousands of pilgrims pouring into the Ganges to purify themselves of their sins. During the day, corpses wreathed in golden shrouds are carried aloft on stretchers along the disorientating galis (lanes) towards Manikarnika Ghat for riverside cremation. ‘Varanasi’s not a place to live,’ I was once told, ‘but a place to come to die’.

By night, Dashashwamedh Ghat teems with astrologers, snake charmers, ash-covered ascetics and hustlers hawking ten-rupee (¢25) massages. Fire-waving young men perform a choreographed aarti – a ritual in which lit wicks are offered to the deities – that would not be out of place in a Bollywood film.

Along Varanasi’s west-bank riverfront are some 3,000 Hindu and 1,400 Muslim shrines. The juxtaposition of palaces, Hindu temples (from Nepalese to south Indian), havelis (private residences), and mosques has historically been as fluid as the Ganges itself. In the centuries since the city became a centre of learning and civilisation over 3,000 years ago, buildings have toppled into the Ganges during seasonal floods.

‘The heritage zone is at risk of being irreversibly modified or even destroyed due to immense pressures from tourism, economic development and population pressures,’ says leading Varanasi scholar Professor Rana Singh, of Banaras Hindu University. ‘Along the riverfront there has been a spate of illegal encroachments, such as new restaurants and guesthouses built without planning consent.’

I experience these problems first-hand during a walk along the ghats with Vishwanath Shukla of the Kautilya Society, an organisation that is attempting to preserve Varanasi’s cultural heritage.

‘All illegal,’ says Vishwanath dismissively as we pass numerous modern concrete guesthouses and restaurants dotted along the riverfront. At Manmandir Ghat, a 1586 Rajasthan-style palace with exquisite ornately carved jharoka balconies, there is one of only four observatories in India built by the great astronomer-king Maharaja Jai Singh of Jaipur. Supposedly a National Archaeological Monument, and therefore protected from inappropriate development within 300m, it is now dwarfed by an ugly new guesthouse and restaurant. The newcomer even has had the audacity to steal its sunlight, rendering the observatory’s sundials useless.

‘There’s a local government order prohibiting development within 200m of the Ganges, but nobody cares,’ adds Vishwanath, after passing a new-build silk emporium standing incongruously close to the ornate south Indian temple of Kedar Ghat.

Elsewhere the problem is neglect. Two minarets of another National Archaeological Monument, the 17th-century Aurangzeb Mosque, have fallen, while the Balaji Temple collapsed in 1998 killing nine pilgrims. Finally, Vishwanath and I come to the magnificent, Mughal-style, 18th-century Chet Singh Palace, built in 1770 and owned by the present Maharaja of Varanasi. It is derelict; weeds and tree roots swallowing it up inch by inch. ‘The king has no money to repair it,’ says Vishwanath, with a shake of his head. t the forefront of saving Varanasi’s heritage is Kautilya Society general secretary, Vrinda Dar. She has little doubt where the problems lie. ‘Weak legislation and weak enforcement are the biggest threats,’ she says.

She tells me orders, such as that prohibiting inappropriate building within 300m of a National Archaeological Monument, are being ignored. I later discover the local government is aware of 300 illegal riverfront developments. ‘Law enforcement is weak,’ says Dar, adding that there is also no legislation to stop the demolition of historic private buildings and that the onus is on individual owners or local authorities to conserve heritage.

Her campaign received intense local media coverage several years ago with the case of Darbhanga Palace. I had long admired this building. Two centuries old, it was built by a former finance minister of Nagpur. Its bold façade, fronted by three mighty pillars, is constructed in peach-coloured Chunar sandstone with a remarkable square tower that housed a manual lift to lower incumbents (presumably too lazy to hike down the stairs) for their morning Ganges dip.

In the mid-1990s it was sold to Clarks Group of Hotels, which gained permission from the Varanasi Development Authority (VDA) to create a new five-star hotel on the proviso they did not change the original structure. What followed was a legal battle after the Kautilya Society complained that the hotel group had demolished all but the palace’s façade, building a modern hotel behind it. Development was suspended after the society argued in court that the hotel would infringe Varanasi’s skyline and its enlarged presence would create further pollution of the Ganges.

The only beneficiaries of the whole affair have been the monkeys, who now disport themselves amid the wreckage of the venture. Dar shrugs: ‘All that’s left is a half-demolished palace and half-built hotel. It all epitomises the indecision of the city in implementing any effective plan for conservation management of the historic centre.’

Hoteliers hungry for prime riverfront locations to meet growing international tourism are not the only ones putting pressure on Varanasi’s heritage. She explains the city’s expanding population is creating intense demands on the urban space, while there is also concern that excessive silting on the Ganges’ eastern bank is ‘squeezing’ the river and intensifying erosion of the western bank’s ghats, leaving buildings undermined or sinking into unstable ground.

Dar highlights a lack of will from national, state and local government to intercede. ‘They do not see the socio-economic benefits or importance of heritage protection,’ she says. More specifically, she blames localised corruption among officers employed to enforce planning. ‘Legislation and government orders state that construction along the ghats is illegal, but VDA officers continue to earn money from people who want to build there.’ nsurprisingly, not everyone is supportive of Dar’s aims. ‘We’re not here to conserve heritage,’ says Veena Kumari, a district magistrate and vice-chairperson of the VDA. ‘But if I am made aware of a problem I can send my officers to see no construction takes place unless approved by the VDA.’ Kumari adds that her organisation has identified 311 illegal constructions that have been built along the riverfront and that have since been served with demolition notices. To date, however, just one, a hotel built high above a historic Jain temple, has been forced to lower the height of its walls.

Kumari may rely on her officers’ reports, but allegations are rife that those same officers have been receiving payments to allow illegal construction to go ahead. ‘I can’t comment and I’m not aware of it,’ she says. ‘There was a period some years ago when three or four staff were identified and removed from their jobs, but the damage was done.’

The Kautilya Society has taken the fight for Varanasi’s heritage to the courts – and has begun to gather support. Businessman Amrish Singh helped initiate the public interest litigation that halted Darbanga Palace’s redevelopment, while advocate Tripurari Shankar engineered an amendment to the Uttar Pradesh state government’s existing Urban Planning Development Act that will include mechanisms for both declaring and conserving heritage sites. But, says Shankur, the problem of any legislation in India is implementation of laws. ‘The people involved in the process are not interested in getting it stopped. They’re interested in making money from it.’

He believes heritage conservation should be limited to the historic districts along the riverfront, though. ‘You cannot make the whole city a museum,’ he says. ‘People have a right to make a living. But it is imperative to get them behind heritage conservation by fostering an atmosphere of goodwill – for example, by turning old buildings into museums to generate income.

Further complicating the matter of Varanasi’s future is the complex ownership issue of its riverfront heritage. ‘Forget the wealthy maharajas. They’re history,’ Shankur says. ‘Many do not have the financial liquidity to maintain these properties. Chet Singh Palace is a case in point. It is waiting for development, but is being damaged because the current Maharaja of Varanasi can’t afford to maintain it. That’s why so many palaces are being sold for development.’

Varanasi’s plight may soon draw more international attention as the Kautilya Society presses for the ancient city’s accession onto Unesco’s World Heritage List. ‘If we achieve this we can help gain international recognition and draw greater attention to our problems. It will also assist us in formulating heritage protection laws,’ says Dar.

It seems astonishing that India currently has no cities on Unesco’s list. At first glance Varanasi, with its worldwide reputation for academia, music, art, worship and ritual, seems like a strong candidate for inclusion.

Minja Yang, director of Unesco’s New Delhi office, highlights a fundamental flaw with the process, however. ‘The government of India has not yet filed an application. No matter how important a property is, unless the national government requests recognition it cannot become World Heritage-listed,’ she says.

‘It is surprising there are no cities in India on the list when India is home to some of the oldest cities in the world,’ Yang adds. ‘Regrettable, unplanned growth has led to the loss of much incredible cultural heritage across India.’

Unesco has been working behind the scenes in preparing Varanasi for possible accession, however. ‘We are hopeful and encouraged things are moving in the right direction,’ says Yang. ‘The question is, however, will any listing come quickly enough to prevent irreversible damage?’ autilya Society’s general secretary Dar believes that, with proper heritage protection, some of riverfront’s glorious buildings could be appropriately utilised as cultural centres, boutique hotels, museums and centres of learning. With careful restoration and enough money, she adds, they could be returned to their former glory.

I witness what is possible when I visit a beautifully restored, 200-year-old haveli owned by Gopal Goel, a silk exporter. He leads me into a columned hall supported by sandstone pillars and topped by ornate honeycomb capitals. It was once an auditorium capable of holding 400 people and took 17 years to restore.

‘I heard about plans to demolish it in the 1980s to make way for a new shopping centre,’ says Goel. ‘It had been abandoned for 40 years and was in bad condition. Now, it costs 80,000 rupees ($2,000) annually to maintain, but it was a dream to restore.

‘Varanasi will not be saved by money alone,’ he adds, ‘but by political will’.

On my final day in the city, I take a farewell boat ride, passing the burning ghats where pyres are ablaze and pilgrims are bathing at the Ganges’ edge alongside wallowing buffalo and laundry-pounding dhobi wallahs. With its backdrop of bustling ghats and ancient architecture, this is one of the most dramatically attractive waterfronts in the world.

Saving Varanasi may involve changing the city’s paradoxical sense of natural order. ‘It’s where life and death coexist; where refined culture and total neglect of heritage coexist; and spirituality and materialism coexist,’ Dar says. ‘But it would be a great loss to humanity if the city is allowed to be ruined.’

HOW TO GET THERE

The author travelled with Finnair which offers daily flights to Delhi via Helsinki from London’s Heathrow airport.
www.finnair.com

From Delhi take the overnight train to Varanasi. Book online before travelling with SD Enterprises. Seven- to 90-day rail passes are available.
www.indiarail.co.uk

More information

The Kautilya Society aims to protect the city’s heritage. www.kautilyasociety.org

Where to stay

Taj Ganges
Nadesar Palace
Varanasi
Uttar Pradesh
Tel: (+91) 542
250 3001
www.tajhotels.com

Taj Residency
Gomti Nagar
Lucknow
Uttar Pradesh
Tel: (+91) 522
239 3939
www.tajhotels.com

South Pacific Brewery, the largest brewery in Papua New Guinea (PNG), ships its slightly bitter SP Lager Beer to all corners of this South Pacific nation. Yet, amid a rainbow of fruit-flavoured vodka drinks on the large hardwood table inside the smoky bar at Vanimo’s Sandaun Motel, one of two lodges in this coastal town, SP is obvious by its absence.

‘There’s no beer in the entire town,’ says Frank Moi-He. On this humid afternoon, he is one of a small group of middle-aged locals sitting in the darkened lounge, whose walls and ceiling are lined with planks sourced from local timber.

A trip to the Vanimo Beach Hotel, just down the road, the day before revealed other shortages. The mushroom soup listed on the restaurant menu? ‘We’re out,’ said the waitress matter-of-factly, as if the situation was routine. The pepper steak? Afraid not, and when the supposedly available chicken soup arrived, it contained no chicken.

Seated near Moi-He is Gabriel Tom Kawa, a former attorney general in the town. He says that for travellers coming from some of the bigger cities, such as Wewak, Mount Hagen or the capital Port Moresby, Vanimo is just a stopover to the Indonesian province of Papua – which makes up the neighbouring half of the New Guinea island – that can be reached in less than an hour by car. ‘The result is that our shops are empty.’

At first glance, the small town of Vanimo, located at the edge of a lush rainforest on the north shore of PNG, is a bucolic paradise. But it is just this pristine environment, and its proximity to its neighbour, that leaves this town of 10,000 residents perpetually short of supplies.

Vanimo’s problem is exacerbated by its remoteness. Land routes do not extend to the rest of PNG and carrier Air Niugini only serves the town with three weekly flights from the capital. Cargo ships carrying rice and chicken arrive at the port roughly twice a month to supplement locally caught fish, such as tuna and trevally, and vegetables grown in private gardens. But, following holiday periods, the stock of goods can shrink quickly, with matters easily getting out of hand on the 19m wharf once the freight lands.

‘Immediately after Christmas,’ says Moi-He, ‘people were already waiting on the wharf for the offloading. Some were grabbing at things even before the containers hit the deck. It shows the desperation that exists here.’

Moi-He points the finger at Indonesians crossing the border and returning home with armloads of local products, which are reputed to be of superior quality and are considerably cheaper in PNG. Tins of Ox & Palm corned beef go for 6 kina ($2.20) in Vanimo, but double that in Indonesia. Indonesia-bought SP Lager has a similar markup.

‘It is not “I think”, it is “I know”,’ says Moi-He, emphasising the reason for the beer shortage.

The coast-hugging drive to the border at the village of Wutung is a weaving journey over paved and dirt roads. Along the way, rocky shores abut towering trees rising overhead as waves roll over the reefs below. The border checkpoint is staffed by armed soldiers, whose presence is to enforce Indonesia’s rule over the Papua province – a controversial administration that has led to bloody clashes since its inception in 1962.

Beyond this point is a series of open markets. A tour through the stalls shows that goods flow into PNG as well. Vendors play cards and recline in chairs next to their overflowing tables as T-shirts, backpacks, speaker systems, pirated DVDs and mobile phones are scooped up by visitors seeking alternatives to the high prices found in Port Moresby. Sex enhancement drugs are sold out of suitcases, but more basic items, such as rice, oil and cigarettes, are also in demand.

Indonesian goods are not the only items arriving into PNG; the national Post-Courier newspaper says around 20 Papuan refugees cross the border illegally each day. Many of those who are successful head to Vanimo, where there are refugee camps. With the land border heavily guarded, attempts are often made by sea where the police are hampered by a lack of personnel. any of the villages linking Vanimo and the border contain rows of thatched huts, most of which are elevated slightly to accommodate high tides. Since the area is a legitimate surfing destination, wood boards, which have been carved from timber dragged from the nearby forest, can be seen propped outside many doors.

October to April is considered the prime surfing season. Storms occurring to the north send large swells down to Vanimo. Unlike areas to the south-east, such as Wewak and Madang, which have island chains just offshore, the path to Vanimo is uninterrupted and results in breakers of up to three metres.

In 1998 the region’s vulnerability to the elements, however, was exposed when an earthquake off the coast triggered an underwater landslide, resulting in a tsunami of 15m waves that smashed into the nearby town of Aitape, 130km south of Vanimo. The disaster killed 2,183 and left nearly 10,000 homeless.

From atop the peninsula that overlooks Vanimo’s bay, the cargo ships hauling logs out to sea make it clear that area’s bread and butter is the timber industry. Vanimo Forest Products, a Malaysian-owned company, is the town’s largest employer. But the timber – the local hardwood kwila, which has to grow for 80 years before it is suitable for harvest – is in danger of extinction, says Greenpeace, citing illegal logging and lax enforcement of regulations as the causes.

Of PNG timber, 80 per cent goes to China, whose mills fabricate home flooring and furniture for the buoyant markets of the US, Europe and Asia. With kwila being nearly the gold standard, selling for $600 per cubic metre, the demand for this endangered wood is showing no sign of running out soon.

That is not the only challenge Vanimo faces. Since a reticulation system is not in place, drinking water comes from ground-water wells or tanks, which are filled by rainwater trickling from rooftops. Sewage is collected primarily in septic systems.

With the population expected to rise to over 16,000 by 2010, according to a PNG water board report, studies are being undertaken to determine the feasibility of tapping the Daunda Creek, which weaves its way down from the hills above the town, as a source to feed a pressurised system. So far, funding has not been secured.

In addition to forcing the rationing of water during droughts, lack of such a system makes fire-fighting nearly impossible. Peter Namongo, an advisor within the West Sepik Provincial Administration, remembers the helplessness he felt when the administration’s treasury building went up in flames in 2002. ‘Everybody stood by and watched,’ he recalls. In subsequent years, storage and workshop structures belonging to Vanimo Forest Products experienced similar fates.

The pace of Vanimo, however, remains unruffled. Even back in the beer-free lounge the relaxed sentiment is evident.

‘By tonight we should have SP Lager here,’ says Tom Kawa. ‘At least, that’s what we’ve been told…’

GETTING THERE

Air Niugini serves Vanimo with three weekly flights (it takes about three hours and there is a stop in Wewak) from Port Moresby.Tel: (+675) 327 3780 www.airniugini.com.pg

Regular air and boat services do not exist between Vanimo and Jayapura, the capital of Papua, but small aircraft and small boats can be chartered on site.

Sea and surf

In front of the Vanimo Beach Hotel and the Sandaun Motel is the pleasant Dali Beach, a good choice for snorkelling. Narimo Island, visible from shore, is reachable by boat.

At Yako village, bungalow accommodations are provided to surfers by the Vanimo Surf Club, the pioneering club in PNG, and the Sunset Surf Club.

www.surfingpapuanewguinea.org.pg

Border crossing

The trip between Vanimo and the Indonesian border at Wutung offers glimpses of beautiful lagoons, dense forests and incredible geology. Once there, access to the markets does not require any documentation but to continue on to Jayapura necessitates a visa, which can be obtained at the Indonesian consulate in Vanimo. Turn around time for processing can be less than one day.

‘Kopi! Kopi panas! ’ The welcoming invitation to hot coffee brings an end to what has been a fitful night’s sleep. I gratefully roll out of my hammock and stagger into the wheelhouse where Akim, the skipper, greets me with only the most fleeting glance away from the shadowy threats of the river.

I wrap my hands around an enamel mug of coffee – sweetened with great quantities of condensed milk – and duck out onto the dew-dampened bow. The jungle-clad riverbanks swirl here and there with heavy mist and the equatorial sun is just bleaching the sky dead-ahead. During the night we have zigzagged once again back into the southern hemisphere, but the sun is rising on a landscape that seems identical in every way to the one upon which it had set precisely 12 hours earlier. For three days and nights the old cargo boat has been puttering steadily into the heart of Borneo.

In the scale of Indonesia’s longest river, three days’ travel is not a great deal and we are still only halfway through our voyage. It seems that the giant trees have crept almost imperceptibly closer during the night and, if anything, the current is running slightly faster. Akim is guiding the spotlight in its last sweeping search of the swirling current now, straining his eyes for the telltale swirls of current around half-hidden logs. A lantern, glowing faintly on a floating platform, shows the position of a jungle village.

In an hour or so the first of the villagers will come down to the river to wash. But for now there is just the yap of some village mongrel and the muffled splash of a dugout being pushed away from its moorings, bound no doubt for a quick dawn patrol around the fish-traps.

It was a scene that can have changed little since Joseph Conrad cruised the inland waterways of Borneo. The old timber cargo boat herself is part of a tradition that goes back even before that time. Bandung trading boats – very much like the 28-metre Jongkung Utama – have been moored on the mighty Kapuas for hundreds of years. There was a time, not so very long ago, when they were the preferred form of business establishment here; Malay traders and shrewd Chinese entrepreneurs alike appreciated the advantage of being able to cut loose from the bank in the event of a surprise attack from an Iban headhunting party.

Fanico Lorensius, the boat’s owner, comes out of the wheelhouse, scratching a chubby paunch under his vest. The Jongkong Utama has been plying these waters for over 30 years, but Lorensius bought her seven years ago and he and his crew of eight have spent the majority of those years living onboard as they trade goods between the coast and the farthest navigable reaches of the interior. These days, the upriver trade is often in plastic and electronic goods but, on the return journey, the hold is filled with raw rubber. Even today, the cargo boat skippers will often return from the interior with the bird’s nests and camphor and extravagant medicinal cure-alls – ranging from bear bile to monkey’s gallstones to deer foetuses – that continue to fetch a high price from Chinese traders
Today there are almost 300 large trading boats constantly making the 1,000km, six-day voyage between the coastal port of Pontianak and the jungle frontier-town of Putussibau. Thousands of people spend almost their entire lives travelling endlessly from one end of the river to the other.

Twenty-three year old Ida works as a cook onboard the cargo boats. Three times a day she prepares rice and fish – occasionally with a fried egg, or some fiery chillies by way of variety. At the last port, rather than wait while fresh cargo is loaded, Ida jumps ship and finds a new berth for the return trip. There are, of course, riverside bawdyhouses and working girls strategically located along the river, but this is not Ida’s scene and she makes most of her living wage by selling imported baby clothes to upriver communities.

The arrival of Ida and the crew is an important event in the life of riverside communities and they are welcomed at every stop as long-lost friends. They pass on news and gossip of happenings on other stretches of the river and the villagers regale them with tales of momentous events since the boat last docked here.

A junior crewman on one of these boats might make $100 per trip to send to his family. The boatmen’s pleasures are simple. In the Muslim town of Sintang there are often other boats moored and a chance for some innocent socialising. In Jongkong the rules are slightly more lax and there is often an illegal gambling session in a kolok-kolok dice-den followed by a bottle or two of fiery arak on the wharf. You are a long way from refrigerators here and the local Anker beer is invariably served warm; ask for cold beer and you get it with a glass of ice.

‘What’d you expect?’ says Akim with a grin, ‘this is Jongkong, not Hong Kong.’ n Pontianak and Putussibau, between voyages, there might be the chance for some more boisterous partying. I have already seen the effect that a few bottles of arak and a guitar can have on a gathering of wharfies and crew during a long and rowdy night at Pontianak dock. The ubiquitous concession to onboard entertainment is the powerful hi-fi karaoke system that seems designed specifically to facilitate the exportation of bleating Javanese pop to the unsuspecting upriver population. Most of the boats have these systems and the crews and captains are inordinately proud of them. Just as they display the power of their engines with good-hearted racing upriver, so two static cargo-boats, moored in an otherwise peaceful riverside hamlet, will frequently embark on a mind-reeling duel to see who can boast the baddest base.

Fanico, as befits the owner, has his own cabin – furnished with a mattress, a heap of comics and an old TV – and the crew sleep on rattan mats in a small room just behind the wheelhouse. Virtually all the remaining areas of the boat are reserved for the cargo of furniture, stacks of eggs, sacks of sugar, electronics and mountains of plastic buckets. There are also the satellite dishes that are steadily blossoming like huge flowers in every riverside village and barrels of gasoline and tyres for the logging vehicles that are intent on working the headwaters even of many of Borneo’s remotest rivers.

I had strung my hammock in the lower hold, among sacks of Javanese rice (apparently considered superior to locally

grown jungle-rice). On stormy days when the shutters are swung down the hold is stuffy and smells thickly of rubber and rice dust. But it is comfortable enough and the hammock neutralised much of the shuddering of the boat’s engine.

The stilted town of Selimbau must be one of the most beautiful kampongs in all Borneo. We arrive in early morning when the delicate pastel paintwork of the houses and mosques are reflected in the gently rippling surface of the inlet upon which the town is built. There are many kilometres of stilted walkways here and different quarters are linked with quaint humpback bridges. The waterfront is bedecked with floating pontoons upon which women in coolie hats beat their washing and naked children splash and play.

‘The water from here onwards is perfectly clean,’ Fanico says as we putter back into the main stream. ‘There’s an old lady called Nenek Moyang who has drunk it all her life. She’s over 100 years old.’

As Akim threads the Jongkong Utama between the curves and currents he has to hug the bank to avoid what must be one of the strangest river vehicles in the world. Hundreds of logs have been lashed together with rattan cord and the resulting island (about 500 square metres in size) is being shunted all the way downriver to Pontianak by five small trading boats. What is most incredible – and appallingly dangerous it seems – is that several plastic-sheet tents had been erected on the logs. In these tents live the men whose job it is to inspect the rattan ties. They seem to stroll confidently over the floating platform, but it is easy to imagine that, should the huge floating logs buckle unexpectedly, a crushed ankle would feel like a lucky escape. The men would live like that for the entire weeklong voyage. e arrive at Semitau late that afternoon and prepare for a night moored to the riverbank. The clouds of flying ants that have plagued us from dusk eventually convince most of the crew to abandon attempts at sleep in favour of an impromptu karaoke session in the moonlight. At 3am I realise the folly of trying to get any worthwhile rest and decide to join them.

For some reason there are always flying ants in Semitau but the boats dare not sail onwards at night because this is the most treacherous stretch on the Kapuas. The river switches and swerves continuously and at every turn there are vicious sideswiping currents that, if approached wrongly, can spin a cargo boat in mid-current.

Akim, like the best of the riverboat captains, knows that disaster can come in a heartbeat. So do I. This is actually the second time that I have made this trip. My first, ill-fated, voyage remains a part of Kapuas river-lore to this day; at dawn on the second day out of Pontianak the Sinar Bulan hit a submerged log, and within less than 10 minutes had cracked in half and sunk. Luckily the accident happened within sight of a small village and the crew and 40 passengers were rescued by canoes. We were shipwrecked in the village for two days.

The last resting place of the Sinar Bulan still serves as a warning to skippers, but I was relieved that a reputation as a Jonah had not preceded me among the frequently superstitious Kapuas sailors.

Just as Western seafarers did in earlier ages, the rivermen of the Kapuas still make offerings and prayers before a voyage. The crews represent the broad spectrum of religious and ethnic diversity of the island and the wheelhouses might be decorated with verses from the Koran, a Christian crucifix, a statue of the Lord Buddha and the occasional animist amulet of a Dayak religion.

Even the most daredevil of Borneo’s river-boat captains is aware that you can never be too careful on Indonesia’s longest river.

HOW TO GET THERE

Flights to Jakarta are available from airports worldwide, although all Indonesian airlines are currently barred from flying to the EU.

On the ground

There are no passenger boats into the interior, but the Kalimantan-based organisation Kompakh can arrange flight connections to Pontianak (about $160 return) and help with plans for onward travel in West Kalimantan. www.kompakh.org

09.00: Vienna’s international food market, the Naschmarkt, is a great spot for breakfast or brunch, with fresh delicacies on sale from virtually every country you can think of – and quite a few you cannot. Balkan cuisine is particularly well represented – hardly surprising, it is less than 100 years since Vienna was the capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire (1897-1918), which straddled Belgrade and Zagreb. You can eat outside if the weather is fine, or under cover if it is filthy, but the biggest pleasure is watching the rich mix of cultures at work and play. A century ago, Vienna was Europe’s most cosmopolitan city. Here you get a strong sense that it is becoming a world-class metropolis again.

11.00: Hidden in the courtyard of the old imperial stables, the new MuseumsQuartier is testament to how much the Austrian capital has changed. From the outside, it looks like yet another beautiful but redundant baroque relic. Inside, it has been transformed into an avant-garde cultural centre with two art galleries – the Leopold Museum (with the world’s largest collection of works by Austrian Expressionist Egon Schiele) and the Museum Moderner Kunst (with masterpieces by Picasso, Duchamp and Klee). But the MuseumsQuartier is not just for art buffs. Made up of an interesting range of architectural styles, and with plenty of shops and cafes, it is an ideal place to spend the morning and a useful rendezvous.

13.00: A suave, understated restaurant a short walk from the city centre, Artner serves classic Viennese cuisine with a modern twist (www.artner.co.at). They also make their own cheese and wine. If you prefer somewhere sleek and central, Fabios (www.fabios.at) is Vienna’s best Italian restaurant (and here that is really saying something) with light, refreshing dishes.

15.00: The best (and cheapest) way to take an afternoon tour of the city is to board a number one or two tram. It does not matter which: the number one runs clockwise, the number two runs anti-clockwise, and both go round the Ringstrasse, built along the old city wall and surrounding the old town. This ring road is lined with many of Vienna’s most spectacular buildings, including the flamboyant Italian Renaissance-style Opera House built in the 1860s, and the Hofburg, the rambling palace of the Habsburg dynasty. If you buy a 24-hour ticket – €5.70 ($9) from any ticket machine or tram station – you can break your journey as many times as you like along the way.

17.00: Languid and elegant, a Viennese kaffeehaus is more like a private club than a café. You are sure to find one to suit you – and in the meantime you can enjoy searching. Café Pruckel (www.prueckel.at) – a sophisticated slice of 1950s kitsch, just across the road from MAK, Vienna’s museum of applied arts – is a great choice.

19.00: Kim Kocht (www.kimkocht.at) is a delightful little hideaway near the Gürtel, Vienna’s grungy nightlife district. Half-Japanese, half-Korean, Sohyi Kim has travelled all over Europe and Asia, and it shows. Her idiosyncratic cooking is an invigorating cocktail of East and West – not the muddy mishmash you get in some fusion restaurants, but a vivid blend of contrasting styles. Her compact bespoke restaurant also houses a shop that sells her delicious sauces, and even a cookery school.

21.00: The Gürtel used to be an attractive name for a rather unattractive feature of Vienna – the outer ring road that encircles the city like a girdle, hence the name, but lately it has become synonymous with Vienna’s most fashionable clubs and bars. Built beneath the arches of the overhead railway, Babu (www.babu.at) is a bit of both. By day it is a debonair drinking den. After dark, it is a popular nightspot for the groovy dance floor crowd.

23.00: For a nightcap, head to Café Drechsler (www.cafedrechsler.at). This used to be a rudimentary café where late-night clubbers rubbed shoulders with early-morning Naschmarkt porters, but since it reopened last year, after a dramatic refit by Terence Conran, it is now Vienna’s smartest watering hole. The insomniac opening hours reflect its spit and sawdust origins, however. It only shuts for one hour every night, from 2am to 3am – with breakfast, and other eats, on offer. It is close to Das Triest (www.dastriest.at), also redesigned by Conran – a discreet boutique hotel, patronised by the likes of David Bowie. Alamy

It did not take me long to fall in love with Koleda. She approached me nervously at first, looking me up and down to make sure my intentions were honourable. After a minute or two she relaxed and reached out towards me. She took a particular liking to my trainers, stroking them repeatedly with her foot. When I held out my handkerchief she grasped it and encouraged me to join in a gentle tug-of-war. It was only a game: she released it from her giant claws when she realised it was not food.

Koleda is a Eurasian griffon vulture, two years old but almost fully grown, who was rescued from the Adriatic after falling, poisoned, from her cliff-top nest on the island of Cres. Now she is being nursed in a sanctuary, and, if she makes a full recovery, will be released to join the island’s 70 pairs of griffons whose immediate future is assured because of the crusading vision of one man.

Goran Susic, born in the highlands of northern Croatia, with a doctorate in natural sciences and a passion for ornithology, first came to the rugged, undeveloped Croatian island 25 years ago and was mesmerised by the giant birds he saw wheeling about the skies. ‘The griffon’s flight is poetry in the air,’ he says. ‘Watching a vulture fly helps you understand the perfect workings of nature, especially when it angles its wings and frame and somehow makes headway against a wind strong enough to knock a human over.’

When Susic first encountered them, the Cres vultures were heading for extinction. He decided to relocate to the island to prevent it from happening. In 1993, after years of campaigning and fundraising, he opened Croatia’s first eco centre, near the 1,000-year-old hill-top village of Beli, in a former schoolhouse built by Italian forces during World War II, when they controlled the island. That was where I met Koleda.

With a wingspan that can touch three metres, the vulture makes the air shudder when it takes flight, but you are rarely close enough to feel it. It can fly at up to 120kmh at altitudes more than a kilometre and a half higher than any other bird, and its eyesight is nine times sharper than ours. But such immense creatures are as highly-strung as ballet dancers, vulnerable to subtle changes in climate, the environment, and the destructive activities of their fellow creatures.

On Cres, the vulture’s nemesis is man, who has set in motion a spiral of decline by upsetting the precarious balance of its habitat. Farmers laid poisoned traps to keep foxes and wolves away from their herds of sheep, but Komina, and many others, took the bait – often with fatal consequences.

Other people, from near and far, polluted the land and sea with indigestible throwaways such as china, glass and plastic. ‘Inside the carcass of one dead vulture we found the leg of a Barbie doll,’ says Susic. Tourists on summer boating excursions, meanwhile, can make enough noise to force the frightened birds from their nests, sometimes when there is insufficient wind to support their great weight. Young birds in particular can become disorientated and fall into the sea. ‘Leisure tourists, who sail here on day trips, bring nothing but garbage to the island,’ is Susic’s verdict. ‘The birds are a potent symbol of how we’ve lost contact with nature through industry and consumerism.’

It goes without saying that it was also man who introduced wild boar to a section of the Tramuntara forest that has now been cordoned off for the pleasure of well-heeled hunting tourists who come for sporting weekends.

‘Our focus is protecting the griffon vulture and the future of the island’s ecosystem,’ says Susic. ‘What’s theirs?’ The high fence prohibits Susic and I from entering into the depths of the oak forest, but it has not prevented the boars from escaping into the island’s open pastures, attacking the sheep that not only provide the vultures ultimately with their main source of food, but also help maintain the island’s astonishing range of plant life.

Cutting across the thin, 65km-long island is the 45th parallel of the northern hemisphere, halfway between the North Pole and the Equator. A strange thing happens here: some species flourish north of the line, while others do better to the south. No one has proved that nature somehow knows where the midway point of the hemisphere is, but it certainly thrives here. Cres has almost as many native plant species as the British Isles, including nearly 400 different grasses, and a far greater variety of wild flowers, insects, lizards and butterflies than the surrounding region As he studied the island, Susic realised that the humble sheep held the key, keeping down the prolific juniper plant that would otherwise colonise the open pastures and suffocate the smaller species, one by one. ‘If the sheep go, this magical island will resemble a cultivated garden within twenty years,’ he says. o while it was the plight of the griffon vulture – ‘the flagship species’ – that first drew him to Cres, Susic’s mission steadily spread its wings to embrace every element of the natural kaleidoscope. ‘I set out to change the image of the griffon from an ugly, dirty, dangerous consumer of offal to the king of the sky,’ he says.

‘But after several years I discovered that it’s senseless to study something that’s going to be extinct in my lifetime. I realised that everything below the vulture is important too – butterflies, spiders and snakes, they all have a part to play. If you lose one species, it’s forever. Everything is interwoven.’ Susic is outlining his mission in the dining room of the eco centre, a laid-back, cheerful establishment run by five permanent staff, four part-timers and an assortment of volunteers who come from all over the world. Most of them are highly qualified, but are prepared to carry out menial tasks in return for their dormitory accommodation, three meals a day, like-minded company and the chance to help protect a corner of the planet that has not yet succumbed to mankind’s relentless advance.

Chaya from Australia is on her haunches in the hallway, completing the painting of a mural designed to appeal to the young children who come here on educational workshops. The main classroom houses a permanent exhibition about the ecology of Cres, and the life and mythology of its endangered griffons. Sonia from France is looking after Koleda and three other vultures in an adjoining cage. Scores of others will join them in the summer.

‘These volunteers are the first generation of eco-tourists,’ says Susic. ‘Our future depends on them. An American came here – a 75-year-old from Texas. He told me he had two brothers who were oil billionaires. He stayed for six weeks in the cold spring, working 12 hours a day, and at the end of it he said he felt richer than his brothers would ever be.’

Among the daily tasks for the volunteers is the maintenance of the picturesque looped pathways (including a 1st-century Roman road) that crisscross the fields and forest, visiting long-abandoned medieval villages and older, more mysterious prehistoric stone settlements. Another of their duties is to deliver meat to two remote feeding stations in the cliffs, known as the Vulture’s Restaurant, ensuring the birds survive for a while longer.

On my last day, I bade farewell to Koleda and drove towards the port. Spring rain was sheeting down; a chill wind was blowing hard. Suddenly, I caught sight of an unmistakeable, dark shape high above. A griffon vulture was making light of the elements, gliding insouciantly through the air in wide, sweeping arcs, creating grace and power from the very forces of nature that would have most human beings running for shelter.

HOW TO GET THERE

Croatia Airlines has flights from a number of European hubs to Zagreb, Pula and Rijeka, which are all within easy reach of Cres by road and a short ferry crossing. There are car ferries from Brestova on the mainland (20 minutes) and Valbiska on the neighbouring island of Krk (30 minutes) and a passenger ferry from Rijeka (75 minutes). All are operated by Jadrolinija Ferries (www.jadrolinija.hr).

WHERE TO STAY

Pension Tramontana, double rooms from around $40 per night, based on two sharing, including breakfast. Tel: (+385) 51 840 519 www.diving-beli.com

Eco Centre

The Eco Centre Caput Insulae in Beli is open to the public between 1 March and 31 October. Admission €3 ($5). The website has further information about the centre’s volunteer programme. Tel: (+385) 51 840 525 www.caput-insulae.com

More information

www.tzg-cres.hr www.croatia.h

09.00: After breakfast, head to the Gyeongbokgung Palace. The headquarters of the Joseon Dynasty was originally built in 1395, but has been destroyed a number of times during wars with neighbouring Japan. It was here Japanese assassins killed Empress Myeongseong – who is something of a national heroine after her efforts to keep Korea independent – in 1895, to pave the way for colonisation in 1910. Seoul recently witnessed significant damage to one of its major heritage sites – the Great South Gate – which was badly burned in an arson attack in February.

10.30: Head out of Gyeongbokgung’s main gate, turn left and walk for five minutes to the top of Insa-Dong, an art and antiques district where you can buy everything from top-of-the-range vases to Kim Jong-il alarm clocks. Take your time wandering down, try some of the street food and explore the tiny alleyways with their atmospheric traditional teashops.

11.30: As you emerge into the hustle of downtown Seoul, take a few minutes to watch the old men playing janggi, a game similar to chess, in the park and then keep going until you reach the Cheonggyecheon. This creek was built over in the 1950s as Seoul hurtled towards industrialisation. It was restored in 2005 by mayor Lee Myung-bak and remains a monument to the ‘can-do’ attitude that earned him the presidency in February.

Turn right and join the couples on a pleasant stroll surrounded by gleaming skyscrapers and glass towers, emerging at Gwanghwamun, a landmark gate at the centre of the city. Look for the imposing statue of war hero Admiral Lee Sun-shin, who was victorious against the Japanese in the 1590s, in the middle of a busy 12-lane street. It is an iconic Seoul image.

12.00: On your left in the basement of the Seoul Finance Center is Yongsusan restaurant. It is a favourite of the city’s lunchtime hordes and serves a delectable traditional Korean set meal – dishes of soup, vegetables, fish, meat and dessert are brought to the table in turn.

13.00: Take a taxi or the subway to Samgakji, and the War Memorial of Korea. Technically, South Korea is still at war with North Korea – the Korean War (1950-53) ended in armed truce rather than a peace agreement – and Seoul changed hands a number of times during the three years of fighting, being severely damaged in the process. The relationship with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), from which it is separated by the Korean Demilitarized Zone, has shaped modern Seoul and the museum here is a fascinating place to find out more.

Huge, stark, imposing and situated in the middle of the city, the building is next to a major US military base. There are enough aircraft, tanks and guns, some from North Korea and China, on display outside to distract from the interesting and interactive exhibits inside. If your time is limited, you should choose your era wisely

15.00: Return to your hotel to change then head back out to catch the afternoon showing of…

16.00: Nanta. Spend 90 minutes watching the dancin’, drummin’ and cookin’ show that is Nanta, one of Korea’s most successful exports (www.nanta.co.kr). It is impossible not to get caught up in the energy of the kitchen capers, though do not sit too close unless you want to be showered with ingredients.

18.00: All that cooking is bound to create an appetite. Take a 10-minute subway ride on line 5 to the island of Yeoido, home to Korea’s television stations, National Assembly and stock market. The gleaming 63 building, imaginatively named for the number of floors it has, is the tallest in Seoul and offers delights both in the sky and underground. Before dinner, head to the top for the view over the bustling city, a sight that’s especially impressive if you catch the sun setting over the Yellow Sea. There is also an aquarium. Speaking of fish, Pavilion in the basement is a great place for fresh sushi. It is known all over Seoul and you can help yourself to over 400 dishes – Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Western – for $60 a head.

21.00: From Yeoido, take the ferry to the up-market southeast of the city. The 45-minute Han River trip bisects the city from east to west.

22.00: Take a taxi to trendy Cheongdam-Dong. Soccer superstar David Beckham was seen dancing the night away at nightclub Circle recently. If it is good enough for the former England captain, then it is probably good enough for you – though it could be slightly tougher to get in. Alamy

It was a simple gesture, a throwaway comment. But it was enough to make me realise I was in a different Buenos Aires; one I had always wistfully suspected existed. Passing a makeshift newspaper stand, I had slowed down to buy a paper and had not even looked the seller in the eyes, when I heard, ‘Che flaco!’ – ‘Hey, skinny!’ – he said, beckoning me over. ‘Fancy a slice of pizza?’

For 32 of his 58 years, Oscar Torres has sat on the corner of Corrientes and Bonpland watching the Argentine capital change. The front pages of the newspapers he is selling talk of Argentina’s presidenta – Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the first woman in history voted to take over from her husband and Argentina’s first elected female president – focusing on her toughening stance on growing crime and her promises that this winter everyone will have gas and electricity.

From this spot Torres has witnessed Buenos Aires endure military governments and horrendous financial crises, particularly in 2001. In 1986 he enjoyed the jubilation of Argentina winning the World Cup, and the sadness of the other years when they came so close. And here he is in 2008, giving food, chat, wisdom and jokes to a complete stranger.

I was hunting, perhaps in vain, for the ‘soul’ of Buenos Aires; the Buenos Aires of literature, of tango, of folklore. Did it still exist alongside the change that globalisation and modernity inevitably brings?

Writer Jorge Luis Borges tried to find its soul, and failed. In his 1929 paean to his native city, The Mythical Founding of Buenos Aires, he mused: ‘A cigar store perfumed the desert like a rose / The afternoon had established its yesterdays / and men took on together an illusory past / Only one thing was missing – the street had no other side.’ He finally concluded helplessly, yet romantically: ‘Hard to believe Buenos Aires had any beginning / I feel it to be as eternal as air and water.’

Borges wrote these lines in his home neighbourhood of Palermo. Today, it is a wealthy tourist centre of designer shops, bars and hotels, where the word ‘boutique’ is a prefix on everything. I had to travel farther south. Away from the glass and steel monuments and five- (and six-) star hotels of the regenerated Puerto Madero dockland, away from the Louis Vuitton and Cartier stores of Recoleta; away from the New York-a-like downtown and out to Chacarita, a neighbourhood that retains some of the romance of Borges’ words.

Here, on the corner of Corrientes and Bonpland, sitting with a newspaper seller and his elderly friend who carts coffee around stalls in the flea market opposite, I glimpsed a simple life, one characterised by quiet contentment and mild melancholy, but also by the famous gregarious friendliness of the porteño, as Buenos Aires’ dockside dwellers are known.

‘Chacarita used to be a quiet neighbourhood, full of elderly people,’ Torres remembers between mouthfuls of cheap pizza. ‘But now it’s changing. High-rises are shooting up and there is much more traffic, but the people are still the same. They are friendly and help their neighbours.’ cross the road, flea market stallholders are sheltering from a torrential summer shower. Remnants of Argentina’s past are carefully laid out on tables. Military flags, tango records, perfume holders. I pick up a couple of old photographs from the 1920s, when Argentina was one of the wealthiest countries in the world. They show a stern Italian family, probably recently arrived. A beautiful girl, perhaps 19 years old, looks off into the future with an enigmatic Mona Lisa smile. Many Italian and Spanish immigrants settled in Chacarita, a barrio (neighbourhood) named after the small farms there – the chácara. They opened corner stores and fabric factories, but mainly they opened restaurants.

Today Chacarita is known for its steak joints and pizzerias, including one that is often regarded as the city’s best. (If you want to start a fight among porteños, ask them where to buy the best pizza.) Founded in the early 1900s by a Spanish immigrant, the bombastically christened El Imperio de la Pizza is typical of pizzerias that dot the city. It is a place where workers, business men, lunching families and the city’s poor pop in for Buenos Aires’ classic lunch: a filling slice of thick fugazetta (a cheese and onion loaded pizza), topped with fainá (chickpea bread) and accompanied with moscato, a sickly sweet fortified wine – all for less than $5. Tango legend Carlos Gardel is thought to have frequented the place while he was living nearby; he once said that moscato was an extension of his right hand.

El Impero’s longest serving member of staff is Concepción, who has been working the tables since 1977. She moved with her family to Buenos Aires from Spain, like many others during the civil war of the 1930s, retaining her accent and eschewing the distinctive porteño phrasing that give the ‘ll’ and ‘y’ a ‘sh’ sound. ‘Chacarita isn’t a well-to-do neighbourhood,’ she says. ‘It never has been; the people are poor but good. It is a simpler and slower life.’

Across the road is Chacarita’s most famous landmark – the city’s largest necropolis. While the famous Recoleta gets the lion’s share of tourists searching for Eva Perón’s mausoleum, Chacarita Cemetery is the final resting place of hundreds of thousands, including the legendary tango stars Osvaldo Pugliese, Aníbal Troilo and a certain Carlos Gardel.

Among the cypress trees and white marble tombs, Gardel’s bronze statue has become the focus of tango pilgrims. They come to offer their respects to the most famous singer of the Buenos Aires blues, who died aged around 45 (there is no consensus to when or where he was born – Uruguay, Argentina and France all lay claim) in an aeroplane accident in Medellín, Colombia in 1935. Many place a cigarette in his mouth; a living moment among this city of the dead. ut for a more evocative reminder of his legacy, I head to a small bar in the nearby Almagro neighbourhood. Bar 12 de Octobre, known to its regulars as Lo de Roberto, is an old, dirty place. Bottles stack up to the brick ceiling, thick with years of dust. It is early on Thursday morning, the bar is packed with a mixture of old timers spraying soda into their cheap wine and younger student types drinking beer. A girl, no older than 25, stands up and begins a slow tango, accompanied by an even younger guitarist with a battered nylon-string guitar. Her rasping voice belies her youth. It is forceful and emotional.

During the nights, successions of singers knock back wine and take to the stage, singing laments of love, society in ruins, of romantic encounters and violent brawls. Sometimes a weeping bandoneón (button accordion) accompanies their shamelessly nostalgic songs. ‘Almagro, sweet home / I leave you my heart / like a souvenir of my passion,’ concludes Almagro, a tango from 1930 popularised by Gardel.

Stepping outside the bar, the dark and cobbled streets of the barrio that inspired Gardel could still be carrying people of 1930. By day, buses and taxis spew through the narrow streets, but its residents carry the characteristics of a different Buenos Aires, old ladies still sweep their Italian tiles, while all generations sit in the evening sun sharing mate, the ubiquitous tea infusion drank through a straw.

It is a story replayed through many of the city’s barrios. It is a Buenos Aires that can be seen in Boedo, Caballito, Colegiales and Villa Crespo. All a short ride outside the tourist centres. But is this the real Buenos Aires? Is this the soul? Or is it just nostalgia? The answer is, of course, yes and no.

Further down Avenida Corrientes, is the barrio of Once. Cumbia villera, a music from the city’s dozens of shanty towns, blasts out from stalls selling fake designer gear. It is chaotic and dizzyingly colourful; Orthodox Jews carry reams of bright fabric, Asian immigrants sell cheap electronic goods, Peruvian restaurants sell ceviche, the citrus-marinated raw seafood dish, to customers who occasionally break into song. As night falls, homesick people from the northern provinces of Jujuy, Salta and Tucuman, take over bars with peñas, a traditional folk music. It is the Latin America that those who have experienced Bolivia, Peru and Paraguay will recognise.

Remnants of Buenos Aires’ past remain. Local Once restaurant Bellagamba serves up hearty meals for under $4, while tango crackles away and faded photos of dance stars fill the walls; nearby famous Cafe de los Angelitos has its sumptuous cakes and coffee delivered by bow tie-sporting waiters. But they are islands in the frenetic activity of a modern Buenos Aires. Those expecting the ‘Paris of the South’ should head there, for these are the ‘real’ Buenos Aires. Among the car horns and growl of buses, Torres’ closing remark hits the heart: ‘You should live life like you play a bandoneón, slowly.’

WHERE TO STAY

There are dozens of excellent small boutique hotels in the Palermo neighbourhood, a short walk from Chacarita. One of the best is Home Hotel, Honduras 5860, Tel: (+54) 11 4778 1008. www.homebuenosaires.com

Where to eat

Chacarita’s El Imperio de la Pizza is at Corrientes 5206. To try excellent ceviche, head to the Status, a traditional Peruvian restaurant at Virrey Cevallos 178 by the Congreso building.