Rambling with Rolf

Ring round Iraq

Easter on the Dead Sea

   ^{Our main purpose in spending Easter on the Jordan shore of the Dead Sea was to soak up some spring sun and visit a few old ruins and read the local newspaper.}

Scarcely a day goes by without some disaster headline from Iraq, so let's spare a thought for the guys on the same block: those countries with the misfortune to live next to the neighbor from hell. Jordan, Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia all suffer from the infection spreading across their borders.

Our main purpose in spending Easter on the Jordan shore of the Dead Sea was to soak up some spring sun and visit a few old ruins. So we watched a re-creation of the Roman 6^th Legion march through Jerash (on right) and read the obligatory newspaper while floating in the Dead Sea (above): anyone wanting to do the same had better hurry, because the Dead Sea is rapidly disappearing, a victim not of global warming but overpopulation, as the waters of the river Jordan are diverted for human use. There's a plan to replenish the Dead Sea via a canal from the Red Sea, but this will depend on finding a few billion dollars to fund it.

Travelling abroad is not only about sunshine and culture. It's also a chance to tap into what the locals are thinking, which in the Middle East is dominated by one topic - Iraq.

Considering the impact the Iraq war is having, I found the Jordanian response to be remarkably tolerant - resigned might be a better word, because there's little they can do about it.

The main problem is the flood of refugees into what is a small and economically fragile country. Iraq has a sophisticated and prosperous middle class, most of whom are now desperate to escape. So they head west, bringing with them whatever they can carry - plus their cash.

A real estate boom amid the mobocracies

The knock-on effect on Jordan is soaring property prices, said to have risen threefold since the conflict started, and even greater unemployment, as Iraqis dilute the workforce.

Nothing is simple in the Middle East and the Jordanian view of things is sometimes difficult to understand. On the one hand, they regarded Saddam as a "good guy", who ran Iraq firmly, keeping a lid on the bubbling cauldron of disaffection just below the surface. On the other hand, Jordan is probably the most pro-western of all the Arab states, the present King, Abdullah II, even having an English mother.

Jordan was created by the British in the early 1920s out of the wreckage of the old Ottoman empire and ever since has been conducting a precarious balancing act between Arab and western pressures.

Hussain was no western stooge

In 1951 King Abdullah I was assassinated for being too friendly with the west, a lesson taken to heart by his grandson, Hussain, who was only saved in the same incident by having just received convenient medal, which deflected a bullet.

Jumping a generation because of the mental state of his father, 17-year-old Hussain (on right) became the next king, but first had to complete his education in England. I can't resist the story - possibly apocryphal - of Hussain's first term at Sandhurst, Britain's West Point, when the terrifying drill sergeant bellowed at the diminuitive Hussain "stand up straight you 'orrible little monarch!". In those pre-politically-correct days, Hussain took it all in good part and remained a friend of the west until his death in 1999.

That did not mean Hussain was a western stooge, which would have been fatal. In 1956 he sacked the popular leader of the Jordanian army, the flamboyant Glubb Pasha, because he was British and therefore a liability.

In later years Hussain of Jordan found much in common with Saddam Hussein of Iraq, both leaders of states with explosive religious and ethnic potential. The king who had attracted the scorn of the boot camp sergeant turned out to be a political maestro.

The other big destination for Iraq's refugees is Jordan's neighbor Syria, also born out of the chaos of the Great War, but thereafter following a rather different path.

While Jordan had been Britain's baby, Syria's parent was France. During the 1950s their paths diverged further, Syria falling under Soviet influence and run since 1970 by the Assad family. As Syria is also the state most implacably opposed to Israel, one can see why it is amongst Washington's least favorite countries.

But as usual in the Middle East, all is not quite what it seems. When I spent a couple of weeks in Syria in the late '90s, I was surprised to discover a country much more open than I had expected. No doubt their human rights record left something to be desired, but this was clearly a reasonably tolerant secular state, which stood no nonsense from religious extremists: as an infidel, I could photograph inside their main mosque, while alcohol was freely available and other faiths tolerated.

"Old man Assad" died in 2000, after 30 years in power, to be replaced by his son Bashar Assad, a London-based doctor. Since then Syria has travelled further from its Soviet-style past and appears to be joining Jordan as a state with whom we can do business.

Which is more than can be said for Iraq's other neighbors, Saudi Arabia and Iran.

I have no personal experience of Saudi for the simple reason that this is one of the few countries in the world to issue no tourist visas: with Burma, it is also the only one with no legislature. It's not so much a country as the personal fiefdom of the Saudi family.

The dominant force is an extreme form of Islam called Wahhabism, which indulges in summary executions and hand amputations for theft. Non Moslems are excluded not only from Islam's holy shrines, but also from whole areas around them. Imagine the hullabaloo if the pope decreed that only Christians could visit Rome - an exact analogy.

Because Saudi sits atop much of the world's oil, spends a fortune on our armaments, and is seen as a bulwark against our enemies, we have for years kowtowed to this barbaric regime.

Iran is completely different. Iran is the joker in the pack. Here again I speak from personal experience, albeit rather dated.

During the 1960s and '70s, whenever the Middle East came to the boil - which was quite often, the only air route from Europe to the Far East funnelled through a narrow corridor between the war zone to the south and an unfriendly Soviet Union to the north. This took us over Turkey and Iran, which for crews meant frequent stopovers in Teheran.

Iran was never an easy place

Even in those days Iran was never an easy place, but the smell of progress was in the air. There was a large and ambitious middle class, bent on making piles of money, and a western educated Shah, fast dragging his country into the 20^th century. It was a secular state, which allowed not only alcohol, but even its own wine industry: in the streets you could see some of the world's most gorgeous women, few of whom covered their heads: most amazing of all, Iran was a friend of Israel - we ran flights direct from Tel Aviv to Teheran.

So what went wrong? My theory has always been that the Shah was too weak, a fatal sin in that part of the world. The first Shah of the modern era had been a gutsy street brawler, but his son,brought up in the fleshpots of St.Moritz and the Riviera, preferred beautiful babes to tough decisions.

It's no good having the usual nasty state police - the Savak were probably no worse than others in that part of the world - if the man at the top wobbles. So in 1979 the Shah vanished to be replaced by religious bigotry worthy of the Middle ages.

Since then, Iran has fought an 8-year war with Iraq and seen its population soar to over 70 million. In spite of government rhetoric, the message I'm getting is that many Iranians yearn for a less inhibited, western-style lifestyle.

Unlike the Saudis, who a couple of generations back were desert nomads, Iranians are heirs to one of the world's oldest civilisations. Power struggles are obviously taking place behind the scenes and we would be well advised to let the Iranians sort this out themselves. Any repeat of "shock and awe" would not be a good idea.

© Rolf Richardson. Email: rolfrich@aol.com

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Unhappy Easter

    ^{The view of this holy city Jerusalem hasn't changed very much in centuries} 
Visits to the Holy Land

With easter on the horizon, many hopeful pilgrims will be agonising "Do we?...Don't we?" A few years ago, our local church had to make just such a decision: in the end they cancelled. Easter visits to the Holy Land have long been at the mercy of local wars.

Tourist figures in Israel see-saw wildly, hitting a high of 2.4million in the mid 1990s, down to well under 1 million at the millenium as the intifada took hold, then recovering, only to plummet again with last years troubles. As the causes of all the mayhem are buried deep in the past, this might be a good time to recap on how we reached this sorry state of affairs.

To keep things simple, let's start with the year AD70. The Romans were pretty laid back about religion, but anyone rocking the boat and endangering the "Pax Romana" had to be dealt with. So when there was a Jewish revolt in their eastern provinces, Titus promptly crushed the uprising and destroyed their holy temple. There was a last suicidal stand on the hilltop fort of Masada, but thereafter the Jews were scattered to the four winds.

A thousand years later, the Crusades between Christians and Moslems barely mentioned the Jews, because there were so few of them around. To register serious Jewish interest in their former homeland we have to wind the clock on nearly another millenium, to the year 1897, when Theodor Herzl founded the Zionist movement, aimed at establishing a Jewish state in Palestine.

This might have remained a pipedream had the Great War of 1914-18 not demolished the Ottoman empire, which ruled most of the Middle East, including the Holy Land. Sir Mark Sykes and Monsieur Georges Picot therefore stepped in to sort things out. They would let Russia have Constantinople, a piece of generosity that was overtaken by the Bolshevik revolution, but for the main meal Georges took Syria and Lebanon for France, while Sir Mark bagged Palestine and Iraq for Britain.

Although subsequent events changed some of the details, today's borders are based on the deal worked out by Sykes and Picot. The League of Nations later formalised things by awarding France their mandate to run Syria; similarly, Britain got Palestine.

The Sykes-Picot pact has taken a mauling from historians, but the alternative was to just let events take their course and allow the whole area to slide into anarchy. The obvious solution at the time was to let the two leading European powers, both with plenty of experience of the region, fill the void left by the departed Ottomans.

In 1917, a couple of years after Sykes and Picot had secretly started to re-arrange the map, British Foreign Secretary Balfour wrote that "Britain views with favour the establishment of a home for the Jews in Palestine, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done that may prejudice the rights of non-Jews".

At the time, Europe was immersed in the worst bout of bloodletting in history, everyone focussing on the trenches of the western front, so Balfour's eye was probably not on the ball. Anyway, it's perfectly clear that the second part of Balfour is incompatible with the first, because establishing a new homeland anywhere is impossible without prejudicing the rights of those already living there.

This was especially so in the Holy Land, which is very small, much of it desert, and with most of the desirable living space already spoken for. In 1917 the Jewish population was reckoned to be no greater than 10%: opening the floodgates to this alien religion and culture was not going to be popular with the natives.

When the League of Nations handed Britain the poisoned chalice of running Palestine, London realised to its horror what had been promised and, as a result of furious Arab protests including full-scale riots in 1929, brought in immigration controls.

During those inter-war years striking a balance between Jew and Arab worked, after a fashion, because at that stage not many Jews were desperate enough to want to move to a new country, where the economy was in tatters: in one year, 1927, there was even a net outflow of Jews from Palestine.

The 1931 census put the Jews at only 17% of the country's total and, with further disturbances at the end of the decade, Jewish migration into the Holy Land looked to have stalled. One man changed it all: Adolf Hitler.

The holocaust drove the remnant's of Europe's Jews to the one country that offered them any hope - Palestine. Zionism, which in 1939 had looked dead in the water, was back big time.

Anyone attempting to hold Jew and Arab apart would have had a daunting task. For Britain, emotionally and financially bankrupt after fighting two world wars within a generation, it was hopeless.

The Stern Gang and Irgun, led by Menachem Begin, later Israeli Prime Minister and Nobel Peace Prize winner, waged a bomb-and-bullet campaign against the British, the high point - or low, depending on your view - being the King David hotel blast, which killed 91 people of all faiths and races. Battered by both sides but especially by the Jews, Britain gave up and left the two sides to fight it out.

This was a chance for the newly-formed United Nations to show its mettle, so in 1947 it wheeled out a plan to partition Palestine between Jews and Arabs. It fell on deaf ears. Jewish immigration was now in full flood and all Arabs - Jordanians, Egyptians, Syrians as well as Palestinians - had only one aim: throw every Jew back into the sea.

Bankrolled and armed by the USA, the Jews fought for survival and in 1948 both sides accepted a UN armistice offer. The state of Israel was born.

Disastrously, this new UN resolution merely rubber-stamped the current situation on the ground and bore no relation to the considered partition plan of the previous year. The borders of the new state more or less followed the frontline on the day that everyone had had enough; mere military chance decided where the dividing line should go.

In those early years, as I sat in the sun having breakfast at the Dan hotel in Tel Aviv, I could reflect on the fact that if the Jordanians felt uppity that morning, they could easily lob a shell into my coffee and croissants.

You may have noticed that I wrote "Jordanians", which brings us to the other catastrophic outcome of the war. The Palestinians found themselves written out of the plot.

The 1947 plan of two states, Israel and Palestine, had a year later given way to the harsh reality of the neighbouring countries, mainly Jordan, now occupying Arab land previously promised to Palestine.

Not only was Israel about 50% bigger than originally intended, but every Palestinian Arab had effectively become a refugee. Some were reluctantly absorbed into Israel, but the rest became a permanent running sore in the region's politics.

I spent a lot of time flying through the Middle East in those days and got a whiff of the problem, when our Beirut bus was boarded by a gang of gun-toting youths, obviously from the Palestinian refugee camp which lay astride our route into town. Fortunately no one had yet got the hang of hostage-taking, so after some suspicious sniffing around they let us go, but it was a portent of nastier things to come....

...Which duly occurred in September 1970, when the face of airline hi-jacking changed forever. Until then hi-jacking had been considered rather comical, if a trifle inconvenient, but the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine wiped the smiles from everyone's faces.

Of the five planes involved, only the security-conscious El Al managed to turn the tables: three of the others, TWA, Swissair and British BOAC, were ordered to land at a desert airstrip, known as Dawsons Field, where they were ceremoniously blown up in front of the world's cameras.

Dawsons Field was a gentlemanly precursor to 9/11; a wake-up call to the plight of the Palestinians, but without the bloodshed. Most of the passengers were quickly released, but 56 people, mainly crew, were kept as bargaining counters, before eventually being released. My colleagues on the BOAC plane later told me that their hostage experiences had been tense but civilised.

This episode underlined the fact that the Palestinian refugees were states-within-states. Their fight was as much against Arab countries, like Jordan and Lebanon, which they felt had let them down, as against Israel.

At the time of the Dawsons field hijack, the Middle East had recently undergone one of its frequent convulsions, the six-day war. My earlier visits had been to a region with ridiculously convoluted borders and a divided Jerusalem. In theory, non-combatents could pass through the Mandelbaum gate, but in practice the barbed wire and red tape meant it was easier to take the holy city in two chunks.

My first visit had been to the Israeli side, where the enthusiasm of a newly-minted state came dangerously close to arrogance, but Israel only controlled boring modern Jerusalem, so being in Beirut on honeymoon, I decided to drag my bride to Jerusalem's more interesting walled city....

...Which was still in Arab hands, not of course Palestine - that had vanished from the face of the earth 15 years earlier - but the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.

Although Jerusalem is the city where the three great monotheistic religions - Christianity, Judaism and Islam - rub shoulders, in the early 1960s the old city showed little evidence of Jews, who had to be content with a few leftovers on the other side of the barbed wire.

By the time of my next visit, in the 1980s, everything had changed. The six-day war had given Israel control not only of the old Jordanian West Bank, but also the whole of Jerusalem.

The old city was again home to three religions, which were themselves split into all sorts of sects. Christianity's Church of the Holy Sepulchre is so riven by internal feuds that the main key is kept by a Moslem. The Western Wall, sacred to the Jews, is a stones throw - often literally - from Islam's Al Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock. There is no shortage of hatred in this most holy of cities.

So when will the Holy Land return to welcoming Easter pilgrims in substantial numbers? Prophesy is usually wrong, but I'll leave you with this thought. Wars are usually fought over land, but if that is the only bone of contention, the pain does not normally last too long. The vikings soon settled down to be good citizens of France, England or Italy, while the Mongol habit of collecting human skulls was replaced by what the poet described as "stately pleasure domes".

But once religion entered the equation, conflicts escalated in time. The first crusade was preached in 1095 and the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem finally expired in 1291 - say a couple of centuries. The 16^th. century reformation led to an even longer period of bloodshed, which still rumbles on in odd corners.

In the Holy Land, the Jews are less than sixty years down the road of trying to re-occupy and hold on to land lost nearly two thousand years ago. To make matters worse, Palestinian birth-rates are sky-high, while the 1950 "Law of return" guarantees all Jews, anywhere in the world, the right to settle in Israel - all these extra bodies pouring into a tiny area of semi-desert, where living space and jobs are already at a premium.

Naturally, all sides are convinced they have the backing of God. It would be a brave man who forecast the timescale for any solution.

© Rolf Richardson. email: rolfrich@aol.com

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The canal that never was - yet.

     ^{An old map of the proposed canal route in Nicaragua instead of Panama}

The canal that never was 

The high point - literally - for many cruise buffs is a transit throught the Panama canal, feeling your ocean-going palace lifted bodily, 85ft. above its normal habitat, to be then lowered again on the other side.

The canal's birth was difficult and gestation period long, having been conceived in 1881 by Frenchman Ferdinand de Lesseps, who came with an impressive CV from building the Suez canal. However, mountainous Central American proved a far tougher nut to crack and de Lesseps lost 22,000 of his men through fevers before going bankrupt.

As the canal promoters paused for breath, it was remembered that the quickest way between New York and San Francisco during the 1849 gold rush had been via Nicaragua, first up the San Juan river, then across lake Nicaragua, the largest in Latin America, with finally a short hop across some low hills to the Pacific. A canal over this route, rather than Panama, would save nearly 500 miles between the two cities.

The slightly higher construction costs for Nicaragua ought to be more than offset by not having to buy out the French concession in Panama, so by the 1890s the Nicaragua option had become the front runner.

Then politics, economics and a lucky disaster combined to swing the contest towards Panama. The Monroe doctrine had claimed the Americas as a US sphere of influence, so a French canal across the isthmus was something to be discouraged. Fortunately, the French attempt was an economic mess, so the prospects were good for a cheap buy-out.

The deciding factor was provided by nature, when Mont Pelee on the Caribbean island of Martinique exploded, killing 30,000 people in the nearby city of St.Pierre. This was marvellous news for for the Panamanians, who were quick to point out that Nicaragua was riddled with volcanoes, which at any moment might go the same way.

Although Panama was then part of Colombia, this was no problem for President Theodore Roosevelt, who's motto was "Speak softly, but carry a big stick". The American top Teddy Bear simply engineered a revolution in Colombia, sent in a gunboat, dangled a $10million bribe in front of the rebels, and in return got a 10-mile-wide US- controlled strip across the isthmus.

The canal eventually cost $352m, instead of the budgeted $135m, but this was small price to pay for the engineering marvel of the age. Learning from the mistakes of the French, the Americans zapped the malarial mosquitos, hired a chief engineer who knew his job, and in 1914 the Panama canal opened for business.

That was nearly a century ago and the canal is beginning to show its age. Improvements are under way to speed the flow and enlarge the locks to accommodate ships above the current maximum of about 70,000 tons.

But will this be enough? There is now talk of upping capacity substantially by adding the other previous option, a Nicaragua canal. Our recent visit to Nicaragua was prompted by nothing more than a change of scene and some winter sun, but we soon became intrigued by the canal story.

Several routes are being canvassed, including one that claims to do away with any locks by taking a longer way through,making maximum use of all the lakes and rivers. I'm not a hydraulics engineer, but as Lake Nicaragua lies 105ft above sea level, this solution seems unlikely.

As in the 1890s, the best bet remains the Forty Niners' route, up the San Juan river, across lake Nicaragua, and then a short canal across to the Pacific at Rivas.

This would not please the up-and-coming resort of San Juan del sur, where bulldozers would chew up lots of prime beachside property, but the main problems are financial and political. The estimated cost is $25billion, so serious money would have to be found from somewhere. In October 2006, Nicaraguan President Bolanos announced his "sincere intentions" of going ahead with a canal; being liberal and US-friendly, Bolanos may have had a reasonable chance of finding the cash.

However, no sooner had he said this than Nicaragua went to the polls and Bolanos was thrown out, to be replaced by America's prize bogeyman, Daniel Ortega on right.

With Cuba's Fidel Castro and Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, Ortega completes the trio of left-wing extremists that have bedevilled US policies in Latin America. Remember the war against the Sandinistas during the 1980s, in which 30,000 Nicaraguans died? Ollie North and the Iran-Contras scandal? Yes, that was Senor Ortega's patch.

To our surprise, Nicaraguans seemed laid back about the political resurrection of the man most gringos had thankfully consigned to history. There may be an element of head-in-sand in this nonchalence, but there are also sound reasons for thinking that Ortega may not be the man he once was.

With only 38% of the vote, Ortega has to work within a coalition straightjacket that comprises all political colors: he simply won't be allowed to do anything too outrageous.

What's more, most red-in-tooth revolutionaries calm down with advancing years. Ortega is now aged 61 and may have learnt a lesson or two in life. "No longer the Danny Ortega of the 1980s" is a commonly held view.

How does this political upheaval affect the chances of a Nicaraguan canal? Well, it's too early to say, but no one can stop us guessing. With Haiti and Cuba, Nicaragua shares the unenviable distinction of propping up the bottom of the region's economic league. But there the comparisons end. Unlike Haiti, which is almost beyond hope, and Cuba where everything is controlled by an incompetent police state, Nicaragua could actually start going places.

There is no better guide to a country's prospects than how the world views its currency. Unlike the two versions of the Cuban Peso, one of which is essentially worthless, the other unrecognised outside Cuba, the Nicaraguan Cordoba is a fully convertible normal currency.

Nicaragua may have extremes of wealth and poverty, high unemployment and awful literacy levels, but at least it's a country that inhabits the real world. Foreigners are investing in sun-kissed real estate and business is starting to pick up. As long as Ortega does not rock the boat, Nicaragua might just get that long-discussed canal. And if that happens, the economy could really take off.

Rolf Richardson © email: rolfrich@aol.com

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Beautiful Berlin

^{Perhaps the spookiest of all Berlin's monuments lies in the beach resort of Wannsee. It was here, at an idyllic lakeside mansion in early 1942, that the details of the "final solution", the extermination of the Jews, was worked out.}

The fairest city in the world

This is the time of year that thoughts turn to summer vacations and the question: which city is the fairest of them all? New York... San Francisco... Paris... London... Rome...? My choice doesn't stand a chance in this beauty contest, so I'm going to get in there early. My oscar nomination is Berlin. 

Berlin was a winsome child: a century ago, she could have won the Shirley Temple prize as the prettiest city on the block. Then came the teenage years, rebellion and disaster. Living in Southern England, I felt the backwash from those tantrums, first in the evening, when RAF Lancasters droned overhead, and again next morning when American Flying Fortresses took their turn. Target: Berlin. Aim: obliteration. 

By 1945, Hitler's capital had been reduced to rubble, but just to make sure the job was done properly, the Russians then moved in and pounded what little was left of the ruins. Berlin effectively ceased to exist. 

Fortunately, the victors had learned the lesson of World War I, so instead of demanding huge reparations, which Germany had no hope of paying, the American Marshall Plan poured $13 billion of aid ($130 billion in today's terms) into a shattered Europe. 

At first, a roof over ones head was the basic priority, so architectural excellence hardly got a look-in. West Berlin's Ku'Damm was praised mainly because it was less horrible than the gruesome Unter den Linden, rebuilt by the Russians. Beautiful was then not the word for Berlin, but what it soon acquired was a reputation for excitement, as the focus of Cold War rivalry. 

With Germany more dead than alive, the victorious allies had no option but to administer the wreckage of Hitler's Reich, dividing it into zones of occupation. Lying deep in the Soviet zone, Berlin was itself also split into four zones - a carve-up within a carve-up. 

The big crisis came in 1948, when Joe Stalin, the paranoid Russian dictator, suddenly banned western land access to Berlin. Unwilling to challenge the Soviets on the ground, the allies took to the air, flying in everything the big city needed - food, clothes, even coal. In the days before jets and jumbos, when aircraft were small and unreliable, this was a massive challenge, but it worked. One year and a quarter of a million flights later, Stalin admitted defeat and re-opened the borders. The Berlin airlift had transformed the city from hate-figure to hero. 

The makeover was completed the same year when the classic Orson Welles movie "The Third Man", was released. Although set in Vienna, it perfectly illustrated Berlin's role for the coming decades: Spy-ville: the city where communism and capitalism danced a deadly tango and were most closely engaged. 

Free access to all had been written into the Potsdam agreement, but escape from the east eventually became so popular that a wall was the only way of stemming the exodus. For westerners the wall became a tourist attraction, complete with a raised platform, from which we could look over the main wall, across a dead zone of mines and guard towers, into east Berlin on the far side of yet another wall. In spite of these obstacles, people still tried to escape and some died doing so. 

If travel by East Europeans to the west became well nigh impossible, the reverse flow was simple: just turn up at Checkpoint Charlie (on right) with passport and hard currency entry fee and you had 24 hours to enjoy the delights of communism. 

We one-day voyeurs did not see many spies, a naturally modest breed, but were amazed by the extreme contrasts between the two Berlins: on the western side the buzz of a normal city, on the other......well, very little. Shops and restaurants seemed to have vanished. Stadtmitte, which means city center, looked like a derelict bomb site. All over the place they were still clearing up from a war that had ended 40 years before. Sloth and inefficiency ruled supreme. 

Intrigued by this Kafkaesque society, I made an effort to see more. Although access to East Berlin was quite easy, travel beyond that to East Germany was governed by a visa so detailed it almost regulated your bowel movements. 

With all the rubber stamps finally in order, I embarked on my 5-day tour and quickly got the message in Weimar, where the signposting was so erratic that I failed to find the city centre. Only one place looked interesting, so I asked someone what it was. "Crematorium" was the answer. Under communism the most lively place in town was where they buried you. 

The best thing about East Germany was the roads, but that was only because they had been state-of-the art when Adolf had built them 40 years before, and the economy was now so dire that few people could afford cars. But it paid to be careful. Whereas West German autobahns had been repaired and then extended to form one of the world's best road systems, over in the east they had done....nothing.

Where ancient bridges and viaducts had started to collapse, the communist answer was not to repair the damage, but simply to shut off one of the two lanes and then forget about it. 

All that changed in 1989, when communism came crashing down and with it the wall. West Germany's capital at Bonn duly sank back into oblivion and Berlin was re-crowned as capital of the new Reich. It was to prove both an opportunity and a challenge. 

The core of old Berlin had been flattened by bombs and then not rebuilt, because the border, later defined by the wall, ran right through the middle, so the opportunity was now there to build a brand new capital in a central location. 

The challenge was to pay for it. In the event, politicians were so mesmerised by their glitzy new toy that they forgot all about the money angle. Berlin's debt now stands at a staggering $60 billion, which no one has a clue how to repay. 

That's their problem. As visitors, we can just enjoy the remarkable phoenix rising from the 1945 ashes. When I was last there, the main features were forests of cranes. No doubt it's still pretty much a building site, but we can already see the final product shaping up. 

There's Potsdamerplatz, until recently Berlin's ground zero, now sprouting graceful high-rises: and the daringly modernistic Chancellor's office, a far cry from the unambitious blocks of post-war years. 

Keen to see what had happened to down-at-heel Stadtmitte - city center, I found it transformed, the only clue from the past being the wrought-iron work around the U-Bahn sign. 

Although Germany's parliament, the Reichstag, was built in the 1860s, this is also in many ways new. Initially, it was the Kaiser, not the people, who ran Germany; an attempt at democracy in the 1920s was cut short by Hitler, who set fire to the Reichstag in a ploy to gain power; at the end of the war the building was a sad piece of real estate under the shadow of the wall, the West German capital having been moved to Bonn; only since reunification, some 140 years after it first opened, has the Reichstag taken its place as the cornerstone of a genuine German democracy.

The big attraction for visitors is the recently-added dome on right, with its interior spiral walkway and fine views of the city. 

Berlin would not be my oscar nomination if it was merely interesting, but it's also one of the world's most liveable cities, largely because it's new by European standards and so without the historical baggage of a mediaeval street layout. In 1870 London's population was five times that of Berlin, which only started serious growth after German unification under Bismarck. So the city was built with plenty of space, wide boulevards where traffic can flow freely, and an excellent metro. 

It also has plenty of greenery, including the Tiergarten a huge but wilder version of New York's central park. And lots of water; no mighty Thames or Danube, it's true, but a couple of nice trickles through downtown and then, just beyond the western suburbs, lakes large enough for steamers and sailing regattas: although miles from the sea, beaches are only minutes from the office. 

If it's culture you're after, again Berlin is your city. A few of the more unusual items: the vast Altar of Zeus was built in 190BC in what is now Turkey, but relocated in the 1870s to Berlin's Pergamon museum on right: for "wall" history there's the Checkpoint Charlie museum: one of the few Nazi monuments to escape the end-of-war inferno is the 1936 olympic stadium, built to show the sporting supremacy of Hitler's aryan race - the führer was not pleased when a black American called Jesse Owens spoiled the party by winning four gold medals. 

Perhaps the spookiest of all Berlin's monuments lies in the beach resort of Wannsee. It was here, at an idyllic lakeside mansion in early 1942, that the details of the "final solution", the extermination of the Jews, was worked out. 

Berlin is a city in transition, combining history with the latest in modern architecture. As capitals go, it's not expensive, and.....I never thought I'd write this, when I listened to allied bombers leaving to wipe the place off the map.... it's also a thoroughly nice place to visit. 

©Rolf Richardson,11 Wootton rd.,Henley. Oxon.RG9 1QD. UK,  email rolfrich@aol.com

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Trust the experts?

With the global warming lobby in full cry, it might be worth recalling the track record of prophets. For every Cassandra, (on right getting the ax for her prescience) whose correct forecasts are ignored, there seem to be dozens of false prophets.

A leading financial paper once decided to have some New Year fun by inviting half a dozen experts to forecast how their various specialities would perform during the coming year: indices included the price of gold, price of oil and the Dow. Twelve months later, not only was every single expert wildly off the mark, but all had erred in the wrong direction: an "up" forecast had gone down and vice versa. Anyone acting contrary to the experts' advice would have made a lot of money.

Financial forecasting seems particularly prone to banana skins. Sydney opera house was budgeted at $7M and finished up costing $102m, while the Montreal olympics manage to "lose" $2 Billion, an unbelievable figure in 1976. The list is endless.

Other forms of forecasting fare little better. In the 1950s nuclear power was the rage, so cheap, everyone assured us, that you'd be able to use all the power you wanted - unmetered.

Education was another field beset by all-knowing gurus. When, as young parents in the 1970s, we expressed doubts about the new fashions then in vogue, the head teacher replied "how would you like it if I told you how to do your job?" No answer to that.

In retrospect, I wish I'd said that my job was flying airliners and that if we got it wrong we killed ourselves and everyone on board, whereas educationalists were free to experiment with our children, leaving nothing worse than a generation that cannot spell or add up, and abysmally ignorant of huge swathes of knowledge that were common currency in my day - but perhaps I'm just a grumpy old man.

Common sense suggests that it can't be a good idea to keep on pumping noxious gases into the atmosphere, but quite frankly we haven't a clue what the result will be. As I write, it's snowing heavily, so perhaps we should go with the alternative theory of a new ice age.

Planning for the future is a dodgy business, because the future is never what you think it will be and experts almost invariably get it horribly wrong. To adapt Alexander Pope's famous aphorism "To err is human, but to err in spades you have to be an expert". But perhaps this is being too cynical. 

Rolf Richardson email rolfrich@aol.com

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Volcano island, Montserrat

A tropical paradise destroyed

Imagine the whole of southern Cape Cod, from Chatham to Sagamore, visited by some catastrophe. Everyone in the danger zone, two thirds of the population, has to be evacuated, either to the mainland or safer ground to the north. A good disaster-movie scenario

For the Caribbean island of Montserrat, fiction became fact in July 1995, when the Soufriere hills suddenly erupted. The media made us dimly aware of this, but Montserrat is far away and soon the island's problems vanished from public view.

We had visited Montserrat briefly in 1988 and hearing that a new airport, well away from trouble, had just opened up, decided to see what had happened during the past 18 years. It's a story that makes the book of Job sound like a comedy.

Our 1988 trip had been a quick look-see from nearby Antigua. Although Montserrat's tourist industry was small, it looked frisky, because we secured the last room at the Vue Pointe hotel (on right), a 5-acre collection of cottages overlooking a picturesque bay. The hotel employed 60 staff, there was a golf course in the valley below, rock stars were busy recording hits in nearby studios, and expats were opening their wallets for the best real estate. Montserrat looked to be going places....

....Until the next year, when Hurricane Hugo checked in, tearing the roofs off most of the Vue Pointe buildings and destroying a quarter of the accommodation. By 1994 the damage had been repaired and Montserrat was well on the way to recovery....

....Until twelve months later, when the volcano erupted, rendering the southern half of the island, including the dinky little capital of Plymouth, uninhabitable. 7,000 Montserratians had to exchange the balmy airs of the Caribbean for the rigors of inner-city life in England. The hotel, within sight of the rock-spewing monster, soldiered on for a couple of years, until the danger became too great and they were forced to close. (International Space Station Photo )

One year later - we have now reached 1998 - the government decided it was safe to return and Vue Pointe began the painstaking task of renovation - for the second time....

...And were doing quite nicely until 2002, when the boffins ordered another evacuation. Just as well, because in July 2003 the volcano exploded in spectacular fashion, hurling 120 million tons of rock into the air. However, this last eruption released so much pent-up pressure, that it allowed the owners of Vue Pointe to return and embark on their third clean-up, knee-deep volcanic ash - a brute of a job to remove.

When we returned in early 2006, the southern half of the island had become an "exclusion zone", with only 4,000 of the original 12,000 inhabitants remaining on what was left of the living space. As a British Crown Colony - the last flicker of an empire that once ruled a third of the globe - Montserrat has been given financial help from the mother country, but in somewhat grudging fashion. With the old airport abandoned to the volcano, a subsidised ferry link was opened to Antigua, but this was withdrawn as surplus to requirement and too costly when the new airport opened, much to the annoyance of the islanders who now have to pay more to get off the island, as do tourists coming in.

Picking up a rental car from the airport, we wriggled our way round the hairpins, uncluttered by anything as civilised as signposts, back to the Vue Pointe, which we now found in more sombre mood, struggling to keep afloat with only a couple of other guests. Their famous view had also changed, the old golf course now a jumble of lava and the beach further out to sea.

Montserrat was never big on beaches, but it now has a genuine tourist attraction, the volcano. Our first task was therefore to visit the new Volcano Observatory, set high on a hill facing the big bad mountain. The roof is of rounded, air-raid-shelter design, to deflect any falling lumps of natural masonry, while from inside there's a superb view of the volcano through wide-angle windows.

The public tours soon get you up to speed on volcanic jargon, so I can tell you that the Montserrat volcano is one for pyroclastic flows. Whereas Hawaiian volcanos feature molten lava so slow moving you can easily step aside to avoid it, pyroclastic flows travel at the speed of a 747: very nasty.

Armed with this technical know-how, we were in a position to visit the scene of the crime, the exclusion zone. The extent of this varies with the mood of the volcano, but the government erects road blocks and warning signs to try and prevent anyone going too far. You are now allowed to drive across the valley from Vue Pointe, although the bridge that once stood there has long since gone and it's a case of bouncing across a lava-strewn river bed: after heavy rain this river becomes a torrent, marooning the few habitable houses on the other side.

In theory, anyone venturing into the exclusion zone must pay a "hazard allowance" of about $50 for a police escort, but in true Caribbean fashion nobody bothers with this and in the end we found a local lad to take us across for nothing.

First stop was the exclusive Montserrat Springs Hotel, where the lobby was a mass of caked mud and the swimming pool overlooked a lunar landscape. Back to the car, and we were brought to a halt by a barrier, with a notice "No unauthorised entry, offenders will be prosecuted". The effect was rather spoiled by the next sentence: "Persons entering do so at their own risk".

Our guide, obviously well used to this double-speak, just left the car and took us on foot into the old capital of Plymouth, where shops, banks and gas stations were either submerged in volcanic sludge or poked forlornly out of the rubble. This was where the island's high-rollers once lived; now everything is abandoned and derelict, with no hope of recovery in the foreseeable future.

The Vue Pointe hotel lies at the edge of what is considered fairly safe, but most new building is taking place further north. At Carr's bay, they've erected pathetic models of Plymouth's clock tower and Government House, to remind them of old times, but in reality there's only one answer; forget the past and get on with the job of living on the half on the island that's still in business.

A new hotel has just opened and another capital, of sorts, to replace Plymouth, is coming together in the hills around Brades. Living with a volcano is not easy.

 ©Rolf Richardson,11 Wootton rd.,Henley, Oxon. RG9 1QD. UK rolfrich@aol.com

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Uncle Sams' Playground

The Caribbean is America's sandbox

The exodus to Uncle Sam's playground, the Caribbean, is well under way, and this often follows the familiar flightpath of revisiting old friends and relaxing in the sun with a rum punch. But if you're beginning to feel bored and want to explore another bit of paradise, here are a few home thoughts of abroad.

I've called the Caribbean Uncle Sam's playground, because it's the closest most Americans can get to decent weather during these gruelling winter months; but apart from Puerto Rico and its retinue of Virgins, most of it is foreign territory, now mostly independent, but with echoes of the past from Britain, France, Spain, Africa, Holland, Sweden, Denmark, even a few Caribs.

The French Caribbean 

Let's start with the part of the Caribbean that remains stubbornly European - La Belle France. The two great colonial powers of the 19^th.century saw things very differently. The French vision was for the long haul, to set up home abroad. But for Britain, scathingly described by Napoleon as merely a "nation of shopkeepers", colonies were just offshore trading posts. Although India was colored red on maps, it was not really British until after the mutiny in 1857; for the first couple of centuries it had belonged to the East India Company - as if Microsoft, for example, had run a subcontinent.

So when the natives started getting restless, Britain simply shut up shop and went home, some said with indecent haste: India was abandoned in 1947 in a matter of months. France, on the other hand, by now nicely bedded down in "abroad", tried to hang on, with bloody results in Algeria and Indochina.

The Caribbean reflects these different histories. With the exception of a few islands too small to cope on their own, the old British West Indies are now independent nations. Their French counterparts remain French, no longer colonies, but part of the motherland. After the Algeria/Indochina debacle, France offered her colonies a choice of either independence or assimilation, with a bribe in the form of never-ending subsidies for any waverers who might find independence difficult.

The largest French islands are Guadeloupe and the more upmarket Martinique, which has two special attractions: the home of Napoleon's wife Josephine at La Pagerie; and the remains of St.Pierre, once the "Paris of the West Indies" but wiped out in 1902, when Mont Pelèe erupted; the lone survivor out of 30,000 inhabitants was a prisoner in his cell - occasionally it does pay to be bad.

Much smaller, but even more upmarket is tiny St. Barts, so well-heeled it's more Mediterranean than Caribbean. Lots of wealth, little space, and some very steep gradients make for busy and interesting roads. I once grabbed the island's last rental car, a minimoke with a wonky clutch, and then had a great time getting lost, even though one's never more than a mile from the sea. The airport is like something out of Disney, so challenging that in 1990 a pilot landed on top of a truck and lost a wheel in the process, before finally making a lopsided but safe landing. Yes, St.Barts can be fun.

Although St.Barts is truly international, Guadeloupe and Martinique are more like chips off the old block, places where French is the only language that counts. Go to any popular destination in the world and you find visitors of all creeds and colours, and they'll all of necessity be communicating in the world language, English: except the French, who have so many lovely locations tucked away around the globe, that there's little point in going anywhere that doesn't speak the language of Molière: a sort of voluntary travel apartheid.

The Dutch Caribbean 

Another colonial power well represented in the Caribbean was Holland, with the three "A,B,C" islands of Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao, off the coast of Venezuela. Curaçao in particular has a wonderfully colorful old town, but I want to take you to a bit of Holland at the other end of the Caribbean, the midget island Saba.

First, though, we have to get there, which involves a stopover at another unique Caribbean institution, the world's smallest bit of land that's divided between two countries. Just about everyone who's been to the Caribbean has touched base at Dutch St.Maarten, with its jumbo airport and cruise ship shopping, but a couple of miles away, across an invisible border, is French St.Martin, which is rarely visited by passers-by.

We also change planes at St.Maarten before heading across to Saba, which gets even fewer visitors. Boasting the highest point in the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Saba is about as high as it is wide, has only 1000 inhabitants, no big hotels and no beaches...except sometimes at Wells Bay a "wandering beach", which comes and goes as the fancy takes it. The main settlement is called Bottom, which is not at the bottom, but halfway up; while girding the island is the "road that could never be built", but obviously was built. A philatelist might compare Saba in island terms with a rare Penny Black stamp; anyone who's serious about the Caribbean should have it in their collection.

Many islands that miss out on cruise ships or big-jet airports still have beaches and hotels to rival their more glamorous neighbors. St.Vincent, for instance, has a 4,000ft. mountain, lush vegetation, spectacular coastline, and at St.Mary's Kingstown surely the most hideous church in Christendom. You might even catch them at that very Anglo-Caribbean pastime, a game of beach cricket.

Was Dutch, now U.S. 

Or you could try St.Croix, a Danish sugar island which still resounds to the throaty vowels of viking vacationers. Someone should tell them that they sold their Caribbean colonies for $25 million to the USA in 1917, and that today St.Croix is one of the three US Virgins. Unlike the Queen Virgin, St.Thomas, which is visited by almost every cruise ship afloat, St.Croix has never fully recovered from a disastrous hurricane and has a somewhat forgotten air. St.Croix is timewarp Caribbean, with Christiansted possibly the most picturesque small capital in the Caribbean; maybe not to everyone's taste, but we loved it.

Talking of hurricanes, these can be avoided either by visiting outside the hurricane season, which is June to November, or avoiding the hurricane belt. These storms need warm water and spin to survive, so winter knocks out the warm water element: the earth's spin is greatest at the poles, reducing to zero at the equator, so getting as close as possible to the equator is the other safety ploy. Trinidad's massive marina trades on being hurricane-proof, but when we visited Grenada, only a hundred miles north, hurricane Ivan had ripped the roof from every church and dug a large hole in the cathedral floor. Islands at risk may go for decades without any big hits, but if the worst happens recovery may take a generation. And vacationers who get it wrong will have a seriously memorable time.

The backbone of the Antilles, the crescent-shape string of islands shielding the Caribbean from the Atlantic, are the ex-British colonies, almost all now independent. Although the local patois is often laced with French - St.Lucia passed between Britain and France a dozen times - the official language is always English.

Special mention should go to Barbados, not because of its scenery - St.Lucia and Dominica beat it on that score - but because it's arguably the Caribbean's most complete tourist island, offering everything from billionaire's bolthole to cheap and cheerful apartments.

On to the rest 

Many islands - Antigua and St.Lucia spring to mind -concentrate almost exclusively on ghetto resorts, where you pay for everything before leaving home, leaving little for the locals, except the supply of cheap labour. With cruise ships joining the fray as floating ghettos, this is a trend that I'm uncomfortable with. The most extreme example I know is the Dominican Republic, very poor even by Caribbean standards, where all-inclusive resorts make up almost 100% of the market.

Which reminds me to nail down a common confusion. Dominican Republic is the Spanish-speaking eastern half of Hispaniola, whereas similar-sounding Dominica is an old British colony, now independent. With few beaches and no large hotels, Dominica is the Caribbean as it used to be: it has a bit of history, lots of rainforest, great scenery, and the last remnant of the Caribs, who once owned the place.

For one country that has so far eluded me, I turned to the web for the latest state of play. The English-language newspaper spoke of "kidnapping of foreign aid workers"...not too promising, but went on to claim that "tourism had not been affected": I was about to book my ticket, when I noticed their final sentence: "...tourism not affected, because there are no tourists". The country? Haiti: home of voodoo and the infamous Papa Doc. Obviously, still only for the brave.

To say that you could try the Caribbean for a city break might get me committed to an institution: you normally come here for sun and sand, not its run-down and often squalid urban areas. But there are in fact four colonial gems:

Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic, was Spain's first capital in the new world and they don't let you forget it. The old city is not particularly big, but this is where it all began. Colombia has had a terrible press, but reports suggest that things may be on the mend. If so, try Cartagena, which combines an old walled city with a modern skyline to rival many that are more famous. Easily the most accessible from the USA is Puerto Rico's San Juan, full of forts, city walls and olde worlde charm. But the city that should be America's premier Caribbean destination, and may soon be so again, is....

Viva Fidel? 

 ...Havana, Cuba. It's ironic that the animosity between America and Castro happened almost by accident. When the 32-year-old Castro ousted Batista in 1959, he was known as an ardent nationalist, not a communist. Taking over US assets at a knockdown price was not very tactful, but Castro appeared to have realised his mistake by then going on a well-orchestrated charm offensive to America. Only when President Eisenhower ignored this hand of friendship did Castro turn to the only other power willing to have him - The USSR.

The result was a catastrophe for Cuba, which under Batista at least had some sort of economy, albeit based on bars and brothels. By marrying into the family of nations where wealth creation was a sin, Castro condemned Cuba to the same fate. For years Cuba and the Soviets existed in a weird symbiosis, Cuban sugar and cigars being shipped east, while in return a few very lucky comrades were allowed to acquire a Caribbean tan.

This barter arrangement collapsed with the Soviet empire and Castro was forced to go cap in hand to the open market - anywhere except the USA, which still boycotts him. Cuba is now a dual economy, the local one which is effectively worthless, and the hard currency of tourism. Brain surgeons and professors, who earn peanuts in Pesos, become tour guides and waiters simply to get their hands on the few dollars that can transform their lives.

Castro has now turned 80 and is either bouncing around like a young gazelle or at death's door, depending on who you believe. Either way, he is mortal, so soon something has to change. My bet is that before long Americans will again be able to follow the footsteps of Hemingway to the premier city of the Caribbean, Havana. It's a marvellous place, if very frayed round the edges: the original Spanish settlement was built of stone a mile thick, so durable that even Castro's neglect couldn't hurt it, but much of over-the-top 19^th. century Havana is in bad shape. When you're done with the big city, you have the Caribbean's largest island to explore. Bon voyage...hopefully one day soon.

©Rolf Richardson, 11 Wootton rd., Henley, Oxon., RG9 1QD. UK rolfrich@aol.com

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Sixty One Siblings

A visit to the Cape Verde Islands

ambling sometimes takes you down unexpected byways. I've just come back from Cape Verde Islands whose flag is on the left, which has triggered in my mind all sorts of other unlikely connections - Logan airport,mythical Ruritania, America's 300^th million and Lake Havasu City. Bear with me and I'll explain. 

In Britain the Cape Verde Islands have been below almost everyone's radar until a month ago, when the first direct flights started. But Logan airport has for many years featured flights to a place called "Sal". Sounds like salt and that's exactly right. Sal is the salt island and lies in the Atlantic about 300 miles off the bulge of Africa. It's main feature is a series of salt pans, where tourists can paddle around, even "swim", in the Verdean version of the Dead Sea. Cape Verdean fishermen were amongst the first foreigners to hit the shores of New England and later migrants headed the same way, hence the Boston flights. 

Sal is small, flat and arid, which is both its blessing and its curse. Blessing, because this geography provides one of the few places suitable for an airport: in the days of apartheid, South African Airways were barred from flying over most of Africa and built up Sal as a refuelling stop. Add sun and sand to a long runway and you have the ingredients for a tourist industry. 

Sal's curse is that it's an extension of the Sahara - windy, dusty and a monochrome rust-brown. Like the viking who named Greenland, in the hope that someone might believe him, the Cape Verde nation is about the least verdant on the planet. But head west to some of the other Verdean islands and you find mountains and even a hint of vegetation. 

There are ten islands, nine of them inhabited, and all are within a flight radius of about forty minutes of each other. The main one is Santiago below on right, which has proper mountains, and ruins that were once the pride of the Portuguese empire. Sao Vicente has the best deepwater harbour, where cruise ships sometimes put in to break the monotony of an Atlantic crossing. A short ferry-ride further on is Santo Antao on right, where a cobblestone road takes you up and away on one of the world's most spectacular scenic drives - a dessicated grand canyon. 

Migration to America was especially popular from the two most southerly islands, Fogo and Brava. Fogo on right is basically a volcano, which doesn't seem to worry the people living in the caldera, who simply move out when things become too lively, as last happened in 1995. 

On to uninhabited Brava the "old sod" of many Harwich families

More of a travel problem is Brava, the only inhabited Verdean island that has no regular link with the outside world, only the occasional supply boat. Any expatriate - and there is still a Brava community at Harwich on Cape Cod - should therefore only visit his old homeland if time is not a problem. 

The Cape Verde Islands had for centuries been part of the Portuguese empire, but in 1954 a young man called Amilcar Cabral below on right started a small independence movement. Although murdered by one of his own men in 1973, Cabral is today seen as the architect of the Cape Verdean nation, which achieved full independence in 1975. Just about everything, including the main airport, is named in his honor. 

Cabral was born to poor parents in 1924 and was one of sixty one siblings, all sired by his father Juvenal. Although Juvenal was exceptional, birthrates were still prodigious, this in a land, where hardly anything could be persuaded to grow and rain was spasmodic. Large-scale emigration was not enough to cull this excess of hungry mouths, so famines were endemic - there was one in 1941 and another in 1945.

The Grand Vizier's wish

Contemplating Cabral's sixty one siblings set me off on another path, this time to mythical Ruritania, where the king wanted to reward his Grand Vizier for decades of faithful service.

"You can have anything in my power to give", said the king. "Castles...gold...girls...you name it."

After a moment's pause, the Vizier said "Bring me a chessboard" and when this had been done, "I would like one grain of rice on the first square of this board, two grains of rice on the second, four on the third, sixteen on the fourth..."

"Are you mad!" exploded the king. "I offer you anything in my kingdom and all you can witter on about is grains of rice." 

The moral of this tale is that the Vizier knew all about the power of numbers, whereas the king - like most of us - did not. Long before they had reached the chessboard's last square, all the rice in the kingdom belonged to the Grand Vizier. Doubling up may look pretty harmless at first, but the numbers soon start to fly. Juvenal Cabral had not had not merely doubled up his family - which in the long run is bad enough - he had contributed an awesome sixty one descendents. No wonder there was famine in the land. 

The politically correct line is that family size is a matter between husband and wife and no concern of anyone else. Unfortunately, numbers don't understand this and go their own sweet way, regardless of earthly fashions. A century ago the taboo was sex: apparently it went on, but no one talked about it. Now we talk of little else. Today's taboo is population control. 

On to London Bridge #? 

Which triggered my next diversion, the recent landmark of America's 300 millionth inhabitant. Of course, the vast USA can cope with such figures...can't it? Years ago, I got a clue down another byway, Lake Havasu City on right, where a local mogul had rebuilt London Bridge brick-by-brick in the Arizona desert: scurrilous rumor has it that he thought he was getting the more spectacular Tower bridge. As Brits, we just had to see this bit of the old country and, as we relaxed over a beer, got talking to an oldtimer, whose hobby was catching rattlesnakes. Turned out that this oldtimer was actually from Chicago and had moved south to escape the Midwest winters. 

I then realised that this said it all about the American southwest. When the Forty-Niners arrived in search of gold, they were essentially moving into empty space. Some years later Hollywood discovered the sun. As did lots of ordinary folk. In a century and a half, California has gone from zero to the most populous state in the nation. 

I've done much of my travelling in third-world countries and seen just how many human bodies can be crammed into a small space if you really try. A Calcutta slum should be part of everyone's education. But this is hardly a desirable state of affairs, and certainly not for the world's most affluent country. 

As Americans continue to pour into the sunny southwest, power outages and water rights are becoming big problems, the mighty Colorado river having been reduced to a trickle by the demands of irrigation, swimming pools and airconditioning. For those seeking to maintain their American lifestyle, California is pretty well full up. 

Sixfold population increases common in third world

And not only California. Thomas Malthus, the guru of population politics, has been widely derided because his 1798 forecast of mass starvation did not come to pass. But Malthus may have been wrong only in his focus - lack of food. Replace the word "food" with "space" and the Malthusian nightmare is already upon us. It's one thing to improve crop yields, quite another to manufacture more living space on a fixed-acreage earth.© 

Hitler went to war in search of "Lebensraum" - living space. Japan had the same aim in attacking Pearl Harbor. Today, both Israelis and Palestinians are trying to squeeze absurd numbers of people into a tiny area of semi-desert. 

The numbers tell the story: in my lifetime the population of Kenya has gone from less than 5million to 32 million, that of Nigeria from 19million to 145million. Such sixfold increases are common in the third world. At Christ's birth, world population was probably around 300 million: by the time I was born it had reached 2 billion: today it's 6½ billion and accelerating. 

The numbers have an even more disturbing sub-plot, because in much of the developed world, especially Europe, birthrates have now dropped to replacement levels or even below. Russia, in the past a huge people-producer, is losing nearly one million citizens each year and forecast to shrink by one third to a mere 100 million by 2025. As the world's largest country, with massive oil and mineral wealth, Russia could afford a few more souls, but most population increases are taking place in countries which are already full to bursting and often abjectly poor. 

On the Grand Vizier's chessboard global population is approaching the square where an exponential curve starts taking it off into the stratosphere. Juvenal Cabral, with his sixty one children, was apparently unaware of this, even though large families brought famine to the Cape Verde Islands. We refuse to even discuss it. 

The past two centuries have been exceptionally favourable. Not only has science deluded us into believing we can get away with unrestrained reproduction, but Europe, in the past the chief culprit, has been able to decant its excess children onto the Americas and Australasia, almost wiping out the indigenous people in the process. The American super-patriot John O'Sullivan caught the mood nicely, when he wrote in 1845 of "our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by providence for the free development of our multiplying millions". 

However, the world's habitable living space is now all but spoken for: Antarctica, Siberia or the Sahara can never support much life. Whatever we do or don't say, the numbers, which lack any notion of political correctness, will just keep on growing, until something gives: war...? pestilence...? who knows. As the Chinese say: "we live in interesting times."

Rolf Richardson,11 Wootton Rd.,Henley, Oxon.RG9 1QD. UK   rolfrich@aol.com

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Oslo's Arizona

“Oslo’s Arizona” marks another historical tipping point
The Allied victory over the Nazis might have begun here

earl Harbor’s Arizona memorial (on right) is not only one of America’s most poignant war graves, it also marks a pivotal event, that day in December 1941 when the USA was pitched into the cauldron of world war two. 

In Norway there is another watery war grave, but one with no memorial, one that can only be “seen” as a radar blip on ships passing overhead.   Although little known, “Oslo’s Arizona” marks another historical tipping point, this time with an added twist of  “what if...”.   You know idea....What if you had married someone else....what if Robert E Lee had prevailed at Gettysburg and there was now the Dis-United States of America.

The bare bones of the saga are quickly told:   On 9th. April 1940, Hitler invaded Norway.   Britain tried a frantic rescue attempt, but this ended in in such a fiasco that she got herself a new prime minister- Churchill.  End of story - But one which so nearly had a different ending.   Let’s see why. 

The main spur for the invasion of Norway was probably Hitler’s experiences as a corporal in the first war, when he had seen the British naval blockade slowly strangling Germany and playing a large part in her eventual defeat.   To avoid making the same mistake again, he needed free access to the North sea, which meant control of Denmark and Norway. 

Small, flat and bordering Germany, Denmark was defenceless, but Norway was a different matter.  Any attack there had to be by sea, so Adolf went to his chief sailor, Admiral Raeder - who replied that such an expedition was impossible.

Because Norway was a tiddler in terms of population and military muscle, it’s often assumed that its defeat was as much a foregone conclusion as all the early Nazi victories.   Poland, Norway, Low countries, France, Yugoslavia, Greece... a litany of places where allied defeat is now seen as more or less inevitable.

Not so.  Norway was entirely different from these other campaigns and Admiral Raeder’s reluctance to become involved in such a mad escapade was based on sober analysis:

1. Amphibious attacks are the most difficult and risky in all warfare.
2. To reach Norway, they had to cross at least part of the North Sea, which was effectively a Royal Navy pond.  German ships were liable to be slaughtered.
3. German shipping was geared to fighting, not transport.   Of the projected invasion force of about 105,000 men, only a tiny 9,000 could be carried on this crucial first wave - a pathetic number for an invasion.   For the same reason, the subsequent build-up would be very slow: it took two months  get their whole army to Norway
4. The panzers, backbone of all their campaigns, could not be carried in any numbers in the restricted shipping space and would anyway be much less effective in the Norwegian terrain. 
5. Although Norway’s coastline is very long, it has virtually no beaches, so getting their army ashore depended on finding suitable ports.  Unfortunately, every Norwegian port lies up a fjord, from where shore batteries could pour a lethal barrage down at them from pointblank range.

Admiral Raeder told Hitler: “this enterprise goes against all the rules of naval warfare, which state that success can only be achieved with command of the seas.   This we don’t have.   On the contrary, we’ll have to operate under the noses of the vastly superior British navy”.  

If this maritime prognosis wasn’t gloomy enough, prospects were little better if the army actually managed to get ashore. In recent centuries only two European nations have avoided invasion, both largely because they have these strong natural defences - Britain, with its “moat”, the channel, and Switzerland with its mountains. Norway has a “moat” - the North Sea - and mountains, combining the natural advantages of both Switzerland and Britain.  Any German assault on Norway would be not merely risky, but downright reckless.  So how did it actually come to be mounted and, even more surprisingly, how did it succeed?                        

Well, Hitler could be very persuasive: one didn’t say “No” to the Fuhrer for long.   Germany had just obliterated a Polish army of 45 divisions within a couple of weeks, whereas Norway had a miserable 6 divisions, none of them mobilised.   So, “don’t be a wimp, Grand Admiral”, was the Fuhrer’s message.   Just get back to your desk and prepare a plan for the invasion of Norway.

Admiral Raeder did just that and came up with a scheme which can only be described as brilliant:   to hit six Norwegian towns at precisely the same hour, 4.15am, which was first light and therefore calculated to bring them past the coastal batteries while it was still dark.   Many of the troops necessary to secure these towns would be lurking in the holds of apparently innocent German merchantmen, which would arrive in Norwegian ports during the preceding days.   They should then have a foothold in the major population centers, from where they could eventually control the whole country. 

Raeder emphasised that a precondition for success was absolute secrecy.  This was unusual.  Until then, Hitlers’ adventures had been well flagged in advance by his propaganda chief, Josef Goebbles, who had deluged the airwaves with horror stories of minority Germans being maltreated in those countries they were about to attack.  Everyone had known pretty well what was coming.  

A sleeping victim awaits the Nazis

The same formula would be disastrous with Norway.   The Norwegian army might be small, but would greatly outnumber the mini-army available to the Germans for their initial assault.   What the Germans were counting on was that Norway would have no army at all, because it was manned by ordinary citizens and existed only on paper until mobilised.   If Norway became sufficiently concerned to puts guns into the hands of these citizens, the German campaign would be lost before it even started.

By the same token, if the coastal batteries, which were permanently mobilised, got a whiff of what was afoot, they would have their cannons ready to blow the German ships out of the water.  

The German assault was therefore planned on a “need-to-know” basis, many of  the top Nazis being kept out of the loop.   And it was codenamed not as an “operation”, the normal word for an attack , but simply as Weserubung - Weser exercise, nothing more sinister.

It’s now time to move our investigation from Germany to England and to get personal...  to my father, who was not a career officer, but belonged to that accursed generation, which got caught in a lifetime of conflict and chaos:  first the horrors of the Great war, then the depression of the 1930s, followed by six more years of war and finally the painful aftermath of austerity Britain.

In Norway we saw the danger, Danzig was a clue

When war broke out in 1939, my father, as a reservist, was already in uniform.   We, however, - mother sister and myself  - were across the North Sea, with grandma in Oslo, which was then presumed to be safer than England.

This was the period of the so-called phoney war, when Hitler had gobbled up Poland and was taking a break before his next meal.   With no useful slaughter to occupy them, my father said that the RAF at that time was rather like a gentleman’s club, and it was after a round of golf and a drink in the mess, that one of his colleagues invited him to take a look at some pictures.   These turned out to be aerial recce shots of lots of ships in a harbor.   “Where?”   asked my father.   “Danzig” was the reply.   “And what are all those ships doing in Danzig”?   “We think Hitler is going to have a go at Norway”. 

Forewarned, we made our escape in time, but why was my father, about the lowest form of officer life, well enough informed to drag his family out of harms way, while both the British and Norwegian governments seemed oblivious to the danger?   For all the secrecy surrounding Weser exercise, you can’t simply sweep an armada under the carpet.   It’s inconceivable that the reconnaisance photos, seen by my father, were not also noted at higher levels.

Of course, Britain knew perfectly well that something was afoot, but assumed the German activity was in response to Churchill’s public announcement that he was about to mine Norwegian waters.   No doubt Churchill thought the Germans were dancing to his tune, whereas in reality they were putting into action a plan they had been hatching for at least two months.  This misapprehension - that the British were controlling events and the Germans reacting, when in fact it was the other way round, lay at the heart of the Norway fiasco.

A warning bell ignored

As for the Norwegian side, the first warning bell had sounded a full seven weeks before the invasion, when the supposedly innocent German merchantman, the Altmark on right, had been boarded by the British navy in a Norwegian fjord, and found to contain 300 British seamen being taken back to Germany as prisoners of war.  Instead of admitting they had been conned by the Germans, the Norwegians only complained about Britain’s violation of its territorial waters.   This incident put Hitler’s plans into top gear, and, because such plans could not be completely hidden, resulted in a stream of diplomatic warnings back to Oslo.  

On the day before the attack, when there was still just enough time to do something, the Norwegian foreign minister told the cabinet about “reports that Germany was about to turn on Norway”, and then - inexplicably - told the army staff to go home.

But perhaps the most astonishing example of Norwegian negligence came in the “Rio de Janeiro” incident.   At midday on 8th. April, still some 16 hours before “Weser-hour”, the German troopship Rio de Janiero was torpodeoed off Norway’s south coast.   Many of these troops were drowned, but some 100 dripping and miserable Germans were rescued by Norwegian coastguards, who reported this to Oslo, adding that the Germans said they were on their way to Bergen.   And still the Norwegians did nothing!

In the face of this flood of evidence that the roof was about to fall in on them, the failure of the Norwegians to take any action can only be explained as the ostrich-like attitude of a small, frightened neutral country, desperately hoping that if they put their heads deeply enough into the sand, all this nastiness would go away. 

Had they ordered mobilisation even as late as the 8th. April - put guns in the hands of their citizens and alerted the coastal batteries - it’s highly unlikely that the invasion would have succeeded.  Hitler would have been held up to ridicule and all the pain and grief of the subsequent five years might have been avoided.

If we remember the Norwegian campaign at all, it’s about the battles around Narvik and the belated British efforts in central Norway, but the crux of the German attack was Oslo.   If they could sneak into Oslo on time, they should catch the king and government in their pyjamas and persuade them, with guns at their heads, that any further resistance was useless.   Norway might just be a one-day war.

Norway awakes, but too late

It was not to be.   Admiral Kummetz, leader of the assault force, was just entering Oslofjord, when all marine lights suddenly went out:  at last someone on the Norwegian side was beginning to wake up!   This posed a dilemma for the admiral.  If he sailed up the fjord in the dark, without guiding lights, he might well end up on the rocks.   So he went only as far as a wide part of the fjord at Moss and there he waited for daylight before attempting to navigate the narrows.  

It was to be a costly delay, because the fleet had been spotted and a phone call had reached Colonel Birger Eriksen, Commandant of Oscarsborg fort on the right, which commanded the narrows.   This gave Eriksen the vital time he needed to prepare his defences, and, above all, to think.

Because Eriksen, like his German opposite number, faced a dilemma.    Churchill had threatened to mine Norwegian waters and then fired off a stiff diplomatic note - hardly very friendly gestures.   So the ships coming up the fjord might be British.   Or they might be German.   Eriksen simply couldn’t  tell.  It was the fog of war.   Except it wasn’t war.  His country was still officially at peace. Was he justified in firing on these ships?   Especially as he didn’t know their identity.

On paper it was an uneven contest.   Eriksen’s main battery was so short-staffed it could only hope to fire off one round each from two very ancient guns - so ancient they had been nicknamed Aaron and Moses.  Another battery had just had a shift-change and its commander was on leave.   Oscarsborg fort could muster just 3 effective artillery pieces against Kummetz’s 24 large calibre guns.  

As for manpower, the Norwegians had 261 poorly trained men against over three thousand battle-ready Germans.   However, the German task force was already seriously delayed, having had to wait for daybreak to negotiate the Oscarsborg narrows, and couldn’t afford the further delay of a battle with the fort.   Admiral Kummetz had to cross his fingers and hope the Norwegians would be too confused to open fire.

To his eternal credit, Eriksen didn’t hesitate.   When the German flagship, the Blucher, was at point-blank range, he gave the order.  The only two rounds fired by the main battery both found their marks, turning the Blucher into an inferno.  Torpedos then finished her off, sending the German flagship, with most of the top brass and gestapo, to the bottom of Oslofjord, where they still lie.   The surviving ships turned tail and fled.

That should have been that.   End of invasion.  Especially as 80% of the infantry due to occupy Oslo had gone down with the Blucher, leaving a mere 400 or so men to secure Norway’s capital city.   However, the Germans had the advantage of a plan, whereas the Norwegians not only had no plan, but in most cases were still asleep.  Again, we can only speculate on the result had the Norwegian army been mobilised the previous day and ready for action.   As it was, the Germans recovered their nerve, landed troops where they could, and told them to drive like hell for Oslo.

They were helped by another saga of Norwegian inaction, the “Fornebu incident”.   A small Luftwaffe formation was on its way to Oslo’s airport Fornebu, when news came through of the Blucher disaster.   As Fornebu would now be alerted, a signal went out to recall these planes - a signal which never reached the Germans, who in blissful ignorance of the disaster down the fjord landed at Fornebu - where everyone totally ignored them!   Eventually, feeling they should be doing something, this Luftwaffe detatchment decided they might as well take an Oslo city tour, where they helped swell the ranks of the depleted Wehrmacht contingent coming up from the south.

Enter the Norse King and Grieg

 Until now I have been pretty hard on the Norwegians, but that’s about to change.   We already have our first hero, Colonel Birger Eriksen, who on his own initiative had delayed the Oslo-bound armada.   Let me now introduce another:   the Norwegian king  on the right.

It’s difficult for us here, in peacetime and with all the facts at our disposal, to grasp just how confusing it must have been to wake up one morning and find yourself - totally unexpectedly - at war.  King Haakon was one of the few people who from the first never seemed to harbour any doubts.   Germany was the enemy and Norway must fight.   The King became Norway’s royal backbone.

A more plebian hero was the poet Nordahl Grieg on right, born to a distant branch of the same family as composer Edvard Grieg, and my mother’s cousin.   He will be our eyewitness from the Norwegian side.

Nordahl was in the capital, working up a new play, when  aircraft started roaring overhead and a German officer appeared in the lobby of his hotel enquiring after Quisling.   More than a little worried, Nordahl rushed off to the war office, to find out where he could join up, only to find a notice in red stating “no information about mobilisation available here”.   He banged on the door, which was opened by a huge commissionaire, his chest aglow with medals, which proclaimed what a good sportsman he had been some years back.   This official told Nordahl to go home.

Nordahl’s other reason for being in Oslo was to visit the dentist.  With the premonition that there would be few chances in future for such peaceful pursuits, he decided to keep his appointment. No sooner had the dentist finished drilling and filled his mouth with cotton wool, than he suddenly lost interest in Nordahl’s teeth.   Wondering what was going on,  Nordahl sat up and saw some soldiers talking to about twenty mounted police.  There was something very sinister about those helmets and when a couple of the soldiers started setting up a machine gun, Nordahl realised that what he was witnessing - from the dentist’s chair - was the surrender of Oslo.

In every unexpected catastrophe the natural reaction is to say “This can’t be happening to me”.   Nordahl admitted to this feeling of unreality and wrote:   “We had lived in peace for over a century.   It took us half a day to work out that other people were no longer something we could talk to, but simply something we might have to go out and kill.”.

The delay to Admiral Kummetz’s invasion force, plus the snail-like invasion build-up - totally unlike the normal German blitzkrieg - gave the king and government time to escape.   Oslo might have surrendered, but Norway had not.   Nordahl became part of the general exodus, commenting that “we became soldiers of a sort in five minutes, just grabbing the weapons we needed:   no one asked us for name, rank or number”.

After a few days, he found himself at Lillehammer, in later years the winter olympics town.  His job was to load a seemingly endless stream of crates onto a northbound train.  Each crate was sealed in red  and stencilled “NB” in black.   It didn’t take them long to work out that they were handling Norway’s entire gold supply, which they were to spend the next 7 weeks guiding to safety. 

The King and Grieg make it to England

King Haakon and the Norwegian government eventually made it to exile in Britain and America, so that Norway became the only occupied country to have a democratically elected government not under the thumb of the Germans.

Nordahl also crossed the north sea, where his part in the “gold rescue” soon became an legend.   He then wrote what was to become Norway’s definitive war poem, which did much to boost morale in those dark days.   He later died in a bomber over Berlin.

Looking back, we can now see how risky the Norwegian invasion was for the Germans and how it so nearly failed.  A single act by Norway - timely mobilisation, would probably have strangled Hitler’s ambitions.   As it was, Norway took three times longer to subdue than Poland, even though the Poles had 45 well-prepared divisions and fought with reckless bravery, whereas the Norwegians were caught totally on the hop and effectively without an army at all.

Of all the “What ifs...” of this story, none is more tantalising than “what if the German fleet had reached Oslo as scheduled at 4.15 am on 9th. April”?   They would then almost certainly have caught everyone who mattered in bed, and these sleepy-heads, as they looked down the barrel of a revolver, might well have been persuaded that surrender was the only option.  

Which begs another question:   what would then have been the status of ships flying the Norwegian flag shown on right?    This is no idle speculation, because the Norwegian merchant fleet in 1940 was a priceless asset, the third biggest in the world, after Britain and the USA.

Nordahl Grieg had called one of his plays “Our Pride and our Power”, and in those days before flags of convenience this was an apt description for the Norwegian merchant marine.   Had these ships been denied to the allies, or even worse been allocated to their new German protectors, the Battle of the Atlantic could well have been lost, as German U-boats starved Britain into submission.

So let’s give a salute to the commander of Oscarsborg fort, Colonel Birger Eriksen, who by sinking the Blucher, when he had no direct orders to do so, crucially delayed the Germans and so ensured that the allies at least did not lose the war.    

Although we can today visit Oscarsborg fort, unlike the Arizona at Pearl Harbor, there is no memorial to the sunken Blucher.   History is written by the victors and there is no demand in Norway to commemorate the Nazi invaders.  

By Rolf Richardson,  11 Wootton road,  Henley. Oxon.  RG9 1QD, UK. Rolfrich@aol.com

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Higgledy-piggledy Dalmatia on The Adriatic

Dalmatia is one of those places that changes its name at the drop of a hat.  

In Shakespeare's Twelfth Night it was Illyria.   More recently, we knew it as Yugoslavia.   Now it has fragmented into Montenegro, Croatia, and tiny snippets of Bosnia Herzegovina and Slovenia.   As an approximation, let's just say that Dalmatia is that stretch of the eastern Adriatic between Albania and Italy.

    At the bottom, there's Montenegro, a name we can now safely use after the referendum of May 21st 2006, when Montenegro just managed the 55% necessary to split from Serbia, thus killing off the last remnant of what had once been Yugoslavia.

    Montenegro may be small, but geographically it's very distinctive.  Whereas much of the Dalmatian coast runs fairly straight and is protected by long splinter-like islands, Montenegro's short coastline is punctured by a spectacular, Norwegian-type fjord, known as Kotor Bay, approached by an old multi-hairpin road, built by the Austrians in the 1890's.   Down at sea level, there's the town of Perast, much battered down the ages, but especially so by the big earthquake of 1979.

    Montenegro's other claim to fame is Sveti Stefan, a tiny off-shore island, which by the late 1950's had become semi-derelict.   However, spotting the chance for some much-needed hard currency, Tito's communists kicked out Sveti Stefan's last 20 inhabitants and then converted the island into a resort for the super-rich.   One suite was rumored to sell for $1500 a night – a truly astronomical figure in the 1960s.  

    The Balkan wars of the 1990's dispersed the jet-set to safer spots, since when Sveti Stefan has made erratic progress.   By the early 2000's, it was back in business pretending to be a swanky resort again, but succeeding only on garnering terrible comments for food and service.   Recently a consortium has announced plans for a complete re-vamp, but this will need plenty of cash and an infusion of staff prepared to smile at guests.  

    Montenegro is only a short appetizer on the long Dalmatian coast, most of which is controlled by Croatia, a country which in the local lingo starts with the letter H and is spelled HRVATSKA.   This is not just a useless bit of information, because Croatia's international code, for both vehicles and internet domain, is HR.   The country is a very odd crescent shape -  down at the bottom reducing to just a mile or two in depth, and then interrupted by a tiny sliver of Bosnia, to give that country a few yards of access to the sea.

     Just about the first place we come to on the Croatian coast is Dubrovnik on right.   When I first drove this way, back in the mid 1980's, everything was Yugoslavia and no one gave a thought to the fact that the main road, which gives a wonderful aerial view of the old city, was not part of the Yugoslav republic of Croatia.   The rude awakening came in October 1991, when Yugoslavia fell apart and the Serbs used their control of the high ground to lob shells onto Dubrovnik.

     The siege lasted seven months and although this battered the old town, the ammunition used was mostly smallish grenades, which scattered roof tiles to the four winds, but left the basic city structure more or less intact.   When things had simmered down and people could consider a return to normality, they discovered that they had one priceless asset;   Dubrovnik was a world heritage site and famous:  it had celebrity status, so soon money started pouring in for all the repair work.  

     Today you'll find that Dubrovnik is not only back to normal, but in fact BETTER than it was before, because the panorama from the battlement walk shows a vista of new roof tiles, most of the ancient ones having been victims of Serb shells.

    Considering that everyone speaks similar versions of the same language, one of the strangest aspects of driving the Dalmatian coast road in the 1980's was the bewildering change between Roman and Cyrillic letters.   Coming from the north you'd be nicely in the comfort zone of familiar signs, only to suddenly find yourself in foreign territory:  a few miles further on and Roman letters would be back, only for them to disappear again round the next bend.

Welcome to this ethnic whirlpool

    This was the classic fault line of the Balkans, Vienna and Constantinople clashing in an ethnic whirlpool  - to the north  Europe, but pulsing up from Asia to the south, the Ottoman Turks. 

    As the British found when they had to partition India in 1947, different ethnic groups don't separate into nice tidy divisions, but mix higgledy-piggledy, so that if it comes to blows, it's almost impossible to disentangle the combatants.
   
     The historian Niall Ferguson has the ominous theory that  ethnic warfare tends to occur in precisely those areas where you would least expect it - where communities appear to have integrated well and even intermarried.   This was certainly so in the former Yugoslavia, where for years strongman Tito - himself the product of a Croatian father and Slovenian mother - kept a firm lid on any nonsense and where, as a result,  Muslims and Christians, Serbs, Slovenes and Croats lived in reasonable harmony, and to some extent intermarried.   

    All to no avail, when central authority finally broke down - a cautionary tale for any country with a diverse racial mix.   Disasters often come out of a clear blue sky, revolutions when you least expect them.   Lenin's Bolshevik revolution of 1917 came when Russia was experiencing the fastest economic growth and urbanization of any country in Europe.

    And in Iran, where I spent a lot of time in the 1970's, the Shah seemed to be doing a pretty good job of dragging his country out of the dark ages.   Again, all to no avail.      Ever since, the Mullahs have been driving Iran furiously backward.

Is the current affection for the nation state a bad idea?

    So here's an absurd and politically INcorrect thought:   Is our current affection for the nation state really all its cracked up to be?      If we can distance ourselves from current fashions and  look at history quite clinically, a good case can be made for rehabilitating that despised word, the Empire.   At their peaks, both the Roman and British empires worked extraordinarily well, enabling all races and creeds within them to earn their crusts without the fear of being put to the sword.   Even when past their prime, Empires could continue to offer good service.   The latter-day Austrian Hapsburgs and Turkish Ottomans were widely derided, but tottered along without too much friction until pretty near the end.   Is it a coincidence that the 20th. century, surely the bloodiest in the history of mankind,  also saw the triumph of the nation state?

     But back to Dalmatia, which after Dubrovnik increasingly comes to mean the long, splinter-like off-shore islands I mentioned earlier, first Korcula on right, with its tiny but lovely old walled town, then the more wide-open attractions of Hvar, where we were entertained for over two hours by a local dance group.

    Croatia is very much an up-and-coming tourist destination and for that reason is not particularly cheap:  having said that, we had our most reasonable meal in Hvar, probably because here there's real competition.    On one of the smaller, less popular islands, I disgraced myself with the involuntary exclamation “outrageous”, when presented with the bill.  One modest scorpion fish - admittedly shared between three people – had set us back over one hundred dollars.   The Med is coming close to being fished-out, with prices reflecting this, so I should have known better.

    Although the food can be excellent, it's not only the prices you have to watch.   Most countries have plenty of opportunities for “fast food”.  In Croatia I snapped a restaurant sign advertising “slow food”, and they weren't kidding.   Our record slow from entering a restaurant to delivery of main course was one and a half hours.  

The Croatians must have upset the gods

    Next island along from Hvar is called Brac, which is the proud possessor of Croatia's most famous beach, at Bol.  It looks lovely from a distance, but don't be deceived:  the Adriatic is a curious sea, mostly sandy beaches on the Italian side, but close on 100% rock and pebbles across in Croatia.   The Croatians must have upset the gods somehow, because no sooner do you move south to Montenegro - and even more to Albania – than the sand miraculously reappears also on the Adriatic's eastern shore.  

    Bol beach runs true to form in being composed of large shingle – very hard on the bum.   It is also a wandering beach, changing its shape according to the winds, of which there are two main varieties;  the Bora, which howls in from the north and the southerly Scirocco, known locally as the Yugo – By the way, Yugo simply means south, so Yugoslavia was the country of the south Slavs.   Too much Yugo wind is said to drive you mad, so if a wife murders her husband while it's blowing, the courts will immediately find her innocent.   But ladies - Please don't quote me on this, and test it out.

    An island which is only beginning the long trek toward tourist glory is the one stuck furthest out in the Adriatic, Vis, a military no-go zone until 1989, but now fully open to foreigners.   I mention Vis, because it was here, in 1944, that Tito, the Yugoslav partisan leader, had to go into hiding to escape the  Germans.  

Tito, once saved by his faithful dog

     The beginning of world war two saw Yugoslavia in a state of typically Balkan chaos.  There were the home-grown fascists, called the Ustase, and, after the German invasion, two rival guerrilla groups – the Chetniks and Tito's communists.  Tito found himself fighting the Ustase and Chetniks almost as much as the Germans.  

    At first Britain and America supported the right-wing Chetniks, but when Tito was seen to be doing the business against the Germans much more effectively, the west changed its support to the communists.   This brought down on Tito's head the full wrath of the Nazis, who nearly caught him on three occasions – once he was only saved by his faithful dog.   The last and closest Nazi attempt to catch him came in May 1944, when Tito managed to escape to a cave on Vis.   It was such a well-kept secret, that even the locals had no idea he was there.

    The Dalmatian splinter-islands are only part of the story.   Behind them, on the mainland, are all sorts of urban treasures, architectural clones of Venice, which for centuries controlled a string of trading cities, not only in Dalmatia, but also down into Greece and round the corner into the Aegean.   There is the old walled city of Trogir, very similar to Dubrovnik, but not nearly so famous and therefore much less crowded:  and the big port of Split, home of the Roman emperor Diocletian, whose palace you can still inspect.  

    After that, it's not far to the Istrian peninsula, and the second of the tiny coastal enclaves that interrupt the Croatian hegemony.   This time it's the turn of Slovenia to be granted its minuscule access to the sea, most notably in the lovely old town of Piran, another very Venetian place.   

    Of all the old Yugoslav republics, Slovenia seems the most out of place, as if it fell into Tito's lap by accident.   Slovenia is classic Mittel-Europa, Austro-Hungarian and Hapsburg to the core.   Bled could easily be Austria – indeed the border is only a few miles away.   And Ljubljana is one of the coziest and least pretentious of European capitals.

A confusing 5-way tug-of war where they ration their vowels

    Over the centuries, this top right-hand corner of the Adriatic has been the subject of a desperately confusing five-way tug-of war..... Croatia, Slovenia, Italy, Hungary and Austria all competing for access to the sea or simply desirable land.    Even if I could master the complex politics, this would probably take several hours to explain, so let's just pick on a couple of places to illustrate the point.

    First Trieste, which if you're in Slovenia you'll see signposted as TRST - in this part of the world, they ration their vowels.   Having been the premier port of the old Austro-Hungarian empire, Trieste then became Italian, but when, at the end of world war two Tito occupied the city, intending to incorporate it into his new communist Yugoslavia, Trieste became a cold war flashpoint.   In an effort to defuse the situation, it was made a free territory in 1947, part of Italy again in 1954, but only finally sorted out in 1975, with the treaty of Osima.

The man who would be king

    Even more bizarre, has been the fortunes of the town formerly known as Fiume, once the main port for Hungary.   To learn more we need to travel to the southern foothills of the Alps, to lake Garda, and the monument to a name once on everyone's lips, but now totally forgotten – Gabriele d'Annunzio on right.  At Lake Garda's pilgrimage site to Italian nationalism, you'll find not only d'Annunzio's monster mausoleum, but also, halfway up a hill, the stranded remains of  Puglia, the boat used  in his Istrian revolt.

    The year was 1919, when politicians were trying to decide what to do with the various bits of the now defunct Austro-Hungarian empire.   d'Annunzio, who was a poet and high-profile maverick, reckoned that the Italians were about to give away what he regarded as his family home, so he simply got together a private army and invaded Fiume.   There he set up his own little country, complete with its own postage stamps, and then declared war on his homeland, Italy.

    Much embarrassed, the Italian government had little option but to respond, which they did by bombing Fiume and ejecting d'Annunzio.   In the short term d'Annunzio had the last laugh, because in 1922 Mussolini came to power and confirmed Fiume as Italian, but it all ended in tears after the second world war, when Tito marched in, executed all prominent fascists, renamed the place Rijeka – which is how we know it today - and incorporated it into the Yugoslav republic of Croatia.   Although Tito's break with Moscow made him the west's favorite communist, he did not mess about when it came to dealing with his rivals:  in the immediate aftermath of the war, Tito was up there with the best in liquidating the opposition.

    From Istria it's only a quick hop-step-and-jump to Dalmatia's one-time master, Venice – but that's another story.

By Rolf Richardson,  11 Wootton road,  Henley. Oxon.  RG9 1QD, UK. Rolfrich@aol.com

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Editor's Note: If you want to know a little more about this same area, read this story about an 11 day voyage on a Croatian ship here.

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