Niger is the harmattan-buffetted, heat baked, sun bleached, sand-storm whipped heart of Africa, where Sahara, Sahel and savanna converge along the Niger River. This is a place I knew little about until recently, when I found myself unexpectedly at its heart in the humid and chaotic streets of the modern capital Niamey for work. Despite this, Niger will always have a special place in my heart as this was where I was on November 4th, when I checked into the smartest hotel in town with my travelling companion Douglas, just so that I could watch CNN all night long.

November 4th started well - we woke at dawn in a lodge hotel in the W National Park (so called because the Niger makes a W shape as it flows south into Nigeria here)  and spent the morning driving around the park watching animals. While we were really on the look out for the famous lions here, we didn’t get lucky, but instead saw buffalo, antelope, crocodiles, monkeys, baboons and giant lizards - none to shabby for just a few hours driving, not to mention the beautiful tropical birds with long tails and bright colouring in almost every tree. We were rowed down the Niger as the sun broke through the mist and watched kingfishers, ibis and parrots in the trees on either side of us. Then, back to Niamey, a dusty three hour drive where, interspersing sleep with ungodly alarm calls to check on progress from CNN, we duly found out that the election had been called for Obama. Stunned, and afraid this was some kind of dream that I’d soon wake from into the reality of four years of McCain and his dispicable sidekick, I went back to sleep.

It seemed like nobody hear was paying the slightest bit of attention to the US elections. I hadn’t seen it on the cover of any newspapers or heard people speaking about it on the streets, and the one thing you’re guaranteed in Africa is a lot of conversation on the streets with the inquisitive locals. I was back at work by 11am the next morning, and then something extraordinary happened - strangers, young and old, came up to me, hailed me from passing transport, crossed the road to greet me, all asking if I was Amercian and congratulating me on Obama’s victory. One man, deaf to my protests that I was both British and an ardent Democrat, even went as far as to remonstrate me for the past eight years of Bush. “America should be ashamed of itself. Imagine what it was like for us in African dictatorships when we hear that the American election was stolen in 2000, and you Americans did nothing. Your country is what people in my country dream of, so you should know how much you crushed our dreams of democracy when you allowed George Bush to steal the presidency.” It was a humbling thought. But then the gentleman’s recusative face melted into an enormous cola nut-stained smile and he said ”but never mind. That is all behind us now you have elected Obama. Only in America could this happen..” and he went on his way.   

Alongside my insane burning desire to go to Russia, one other country has exerted the same combination of fascination and attraction on me since I was young enough to pick up an atlas - Greenland. This empty land of rock and ice seems to have had this effect on many others too, such as the young Tété-Michel Kpomassie, who, as a young teenager in Lomé, Togo in the 1960s, came across a book called The Eskimos from Greenland and decided he had to travel to the north. He spent the best part of the next decade travelling and working his way through Africa to Paris and then on to Denmark and finally to Greenland by boat, making him probably the first black person ever to visit the world’s largest island (Australia, for reasons I’ve never understood, is a continent). His book An African in Greenland is a hilariously off beat read and portrays the Greenlanders he meets as good hearted on the whole with a penchant for being filthy drunks.

I finally went to Greenland this summer, and, I’m glad to say, found the country to be a far more pleasant place than it was during Tété-Michel’s stay. On a two week journey from Ilulissat to Disko Island, Aasiat, Sisimiut and inland to Kangerlussuaq, we only witnessed a couple of depressing scenes of alcoholism. The first was on returning from a long day hike along the ice fjord in Ilulissat, walking back into town dying for a beer and finding all the supermarkets refusing to sell us any on a Sunday. We wandered the quiet streets for a while until we saw a pub sign and went in to smoky bar filled with the most peculiar looking people imaginable. Mainly Greenlanders, with a smattering of Danes, the clientele to a man could not stand or even speak properly. Loud Greenlandic pop music (that sounds like Hawaiian influenced 1950s rock due to the US Air Base in Greenland built in the 1950s being where modern pop music was introduced to the country from) was cranked out from a stereo through the thick smoke while people slept drunk on the tables surrounded by bottles of Carlsberg and overflowing ash trays.

Gone are the days of doing what Tété-Michel did in the late 60s – turning up in Greenlandic towns and being invited to live for weeks at a time with local families. Now, between cruise ships and the large Danish groups of walkers, small towns can feel overrun with tourists and it’s harder than ever to get to meet ‘real’ Greenlanders – rather than those working in the tourist industry – whose taciturnity is famous, if unsurprising in such a climate. But you don’t really go to Greenland for the socialising. The reason to go is the escape your own life for a short time, to wander through landscapes without roads, to see the inland ice, the midnight sun, the northern lights, the icebergs calve, watch whales, arctic foxes, reindeer, musk oxen and to avoid being savaged by the ubiquitous and sadly unpettable sledge dogs. The trip has made me even more passionate about the great north and I’m determined to make it even further up the coast next time, hopefully to Ultima Thule itself. 

As if we needed it, events in the Caucasus over the past week have answered the question Kremlinologists have been asking (admittedly rather perfunctorily) since March – who is really in charge of Russia since Putin’s bizarre gambit to stay in power while relinquishing the presidency? For the answer see any coverage of the war in Georgia, and you’ll notice that President Medvedev has barely been visible, while heroic Vlad, all chinos and tan, makes belligerent noises in Beijing and Vladikavkaz. This is, after all, a personal vendetta being settled, and it’s very much Putin’s project.

Of course I’ve been glued to the news since last Friday when a sad inter-ethnic ‘frozen conflict’ between the Georgians and the South Ossetians was subsumed by a far greater one, a geopolitical firestorm that has been steadily building between Russia and its erstwhile colony Georgia since the ‘Rose Revolution’ of 2003.

Georgia’s relationship with Russia is complex: not only was it a Soviet Republic under Moscow’s total control for 80 years until the break up of the Soviet Union, but for over a century before that it was a colony of imperial Russia. This explains Moscow’s deeply chauvanistic attitude to what it notoriously terms its ‘near abroad’ - Russians live in Georgia, Georgians live in Russia, and Russian remains the day-to-day language of many in Georgia even today. Unlike the Baltic States, another area Russia considers within its sphere of influence despite all evidence to the contrary, which were only swallowed up by the USSR in the 1940s, the Russians and Georgians have been fused together for almost two centuries and as the senior partner in that relationship, Russia has always felt deeply proprietary towards this tiny, mountainous nation.

Georgia’s administrations in the 90s were uniformly close to Moscow, and followed the Russian development model of autocratic kleptocracy with just enough liberal market economics to keep international finance coming in. Yet at the start of the 21^st century, the two countries’ paths diverged sharply, Russia moving under Putin towards becoming a centralised oil and gas emirate with a vertical power structure and a resurgent nationalistic ethos brought about by a decade of economic humiliation. Georgia, on the other hand, mired in energy shortages, economic turmoil and faced with an election that had been blatantly stolen by Eduard Shevardnadze in 2003, revolted with the collusion of the US government, to bring about a ‘rose revolution’ that brought the young, telegenic reformer Mikheil Saakashvili to power. Since then the two countries have been in a war of words - the Russians astonished at what they see as Georgia’s treachery, while plucky Georgia has been equally angry at Russian meddling in its affairs. 

It’s impossible to overstate the seething hatred that Putin has for Saakashvili. The ex-spook hates American values such as freedom of speech and basic civil liberties per se, let alone when espoused by a Columbia Law School-educated former citizen of the USSR.  On a personal level they have always detested each other, and the past few years have seen Russia working behind the scenes playing geopolitical games to undermine Tbilisi in anyway it can, most notably by using the twin sores of the secessionist republics South Ossetia and Abkhazia to provoke a reaction from Georgia. Last week, the hot-tempered Saakashvili finally gave in and took the bait.

Russia’s appalling cynicism in the Caucasus is nothing new (see Chechnya and Dagestan for a litany of betrayal and brutality), but by taking up the cause of South Ossetia and Abkhazia to destabilise Georgia, the Russians have reached a new low. First of all, the inhabitants of South Ossetia and Abkhazia are not ethnic Russians, they are simply both ethnic groups that would rather be part of Russia than Georgia and were  cut off by the post-Soviet border (that runs sensibly along the Caucasus Mountains, historically dividing the two countries).  The Russians, who have played a partisan ‘peace keeping’ force for years in both provinces, have cynically given out Russian passports to both Ossetians and Abkhazians, and are now ‘defending’ ‘their’ citizens against the Georgians.

Of course the Georgian advance was ill advised, and this is the predictable result, but Saakashvili has been resisting these provocations for years now. Just last year the Russians dropped a bomb on Georgian territory in a botched attack on a satellite, a move that provoked outrage in Tbilisi, but little more than mumbles in Brussels or Washington. Previous to that, when Tbilisi expelled a spy ring working out of the Russian embassy in 2006, the result was a national ban of Georgian goods into Russia and the harassment of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Georgian Russian citizens, many of whom have lived in Russia for decades.

So what’s going on? Russia wants to bring down or at least thoroughly discredit Saakashvili and his pro-Western government, and re-orientate the country to its previous pro-Moscow line. Having let the Baltics slip through its hands at a time when Russia was still economically weak earlier this decade (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania joined NATO and the EU in 2004, Russia’s economic resurgence beginning shortly afterwards as oil prices began to rise), Russia is not prepared to allow another country bordering one of its most sensitive regions to join the Western alliance without a fight. Moscow will most likely be successful in this, as the vocal US, and to a lesser extent, EU support for Saakashvili and Georgia, has not included anything more than lip service to Georgian NATO membership. We can expect a messy peace, a neutered Georgia and even more bloodshed to come in the Caucasus, as other dormant ethnic wars are reignited.  

A resurgent Russia is the greatest political danger facing this planet today. Badly injured, humiliated and angry, this giant nation, drunk on oil wealth and stoking ridiculous acts of nationalism, will not be content with its mere economic resurgence – it wants its empire and influence back. With a cabal of deeply compromised ex-spies, gangsters and other careerists with not a democratic instinct between them in power, we can only expect to see more of events like the war in Georgia in the future. Remember, this is a country that shamelessly – and with seeming impunity – murders its critics using radioactive isotopes in foreign lands, or, in other circumstances, the good old bullet in the head. Ukrainians, who, like the Georgians, have rejected the autocratic path and Moscow line for the liberal democratic one and aspire to join both NATO and the EU, should be watching these events with especial interest, as they could well be next. 

So Beijing is here with us. Am I alone in being totally alienated by the Olympics? Not just because giving the games with all their idealism about freedom and brotherhood to the repulsive junta of Hu Jintao is on par with them being given to Hitler in 1936, but simply because I’ve heard almost nothing about the sports themselves. It’s all about the opening ceremony, the bird’s nest, which politician is attending which beautifully-choreographed but rather pointless ceremony and how bad the pollution is.

Yet the worst thing is the disingenuous attitude of the Chinese government, who, reacting with righteous anger whenever criticised on human rights, decry the ‘politicisation’ of the games. This is pretty rich, as this Olympiad has been political for the Chinese from the start: a pissing contest with the US over medals, a coming-out party for the Chinese economic miracle, and the conferring of some form of legitimacy on China’s cultural holocaust in Tibet, its repression of religious minorities and imprisonment of political dissidents.

The only times I have ever felt free in Beijing is when returning from time spent in North Korea. On that wonderful overnight train journey through Liaoning Province after a week or so in the ‘axis of evil,’ emerging from Beijing’s sepulchral train station into capitalist-frenzy of street-level China is a real shock for its colour and vibrancy, and a pleasant one at that. Sadly though, coming from almost anywhere else in the world, Beijing feels like what it is – the polluted capital of a massive police state and a city whose human face has been concreted over beyond recognition. The Olympics should be political, and in this case the international community has been woefully trusting of a Chinese government who want all the glory of being a great world power with none of the responsibility.

When holidays go wrong… if I wasn’t being paid to be here, I’d be very pissed off (as I imagine poor Chris is). The Faroes, where you can basically do three things (watch birds, hike and stare at the scenery and mutter meaningless superlatives) are not much fun in the rain and fog. It had stormed and howled all night and so it was no surprise this morning not to be able to see the other side of the fjord. Undeterred, we still managed to cover the entire island, albeit largely from inside the car. The highlight of the day was definitely seeing a lamb standing on the back of a sheep, apparently dancing. It was that kind of day.

We drove from town to town over high mountain single-lane passes with visibility down to just a few meters and through extraordinary new tunnels hewn through the basalt rock connecting tiny hamlet to tiny hamlet. Later on we visited the new pub in Tvøyori, the main town on the island, and drank the excellent gold label Gull export lager they make here – at 5.8% a much better prospect than the standard piss-weak stuff they try to serve you elsewhere. Bed now and the fog has finally receded from the fjord, meaning we can see the other side. We’re just hoping that the weather is good enough for the helicopter to land and take us to Skúvoy tomorrow so that we can stick to our military-style itinerary…

Going in a helicopter is about the most exciting thing anyone can do anyway, but to do it in the Faroes is spectacular. The pure physical geography of the islands suddenly becomes apparent, and immediately seeing them from sea level seems unacceptable. With a couple of drops on other islands (including on Stróma Dímum, where there’s nothing but a single farm and a population of two people – we passed out a crate of potatoes and some toilet bleach) we landed in the far south of the Faroes on the island of Suduroy. The guesthouse we’re staying in looks very Condé Nast Traveller, but costs peanuts. We are sharing the whole 15-bedroom thing with a Danish couple who claim to have come to the Faroes every year for the past 14 years and are hitch-hiking around either, as they claim, because that way they chat to locals and have a lovely time, or, as Chris claims, because we rented the last available hire car on the island.

Tvøyori, the unofficial capital of cut-off Suduroy, is sprinkled down a long fjord, and looks identical to every other town I’ve seen in the Faroes, a Lego-like assembly of uniform box houses painted in bright colours. It occurred to me that Lego, being Danish, was modelled on Danish-style housing and so perhaps Lego looks like Danish-style housing and not the other way around, but even so there’s something rather idyllic about these settlements for anyone who grew up with a Lego set and still, on some level, feels that this is how a town should look.

We headed to the local Bónus (Faroese Tesco it would seem) after completing the work for the day (two hotels, a car hire place, a pub and a walk) and engaged in the least mature but most enjoyable part of any trip abroad: buying products with silly names from foreign supermarkets. Languages like Danish (Faroeses being spoken by so few people that nothing is labelled in it) are brilliant for this game, as they have such intrinsically humorous words in the first place. I was basically expecting everything to be called Slag Munch, or even better, Höb Nöb à la French & Saunders. The overall victor was a small tin of Makrel Guf (small enough to bring home, though I will be carrying a can of tinned fish around for the next two weeks). I was also fond of Karki Pussi (cat food) and Kylling (dog food with a cute picture of the Andrex puppy on the cover) – sadly they only came in large packets, so I didn’t indulge.

Today we left the island of Vágar for Mykines by ferry. Having avoided the two deeply annoying backpackers from Singapore who had flooded the bathroom and not cleaned it up and already asked us to rent a car with them ‘because we forgot to bring our licenses,’ we got the bus to the port, and hopped on the 45 minute boat ride out to the Faroes’ most westerly island, taking us past some glorious vertical rocks that shot out of the water to soaring heights.

Mykines is an almost uninhabited lump of rock, much of which is totally inaccessible. The tiny eponymous village sits in a small valley, on one of the only relatively flat areas of the entire island. Its population is just 12 people and among these is Kristina, a young entrepreneuse whose Kristianshús guesthouse is about the only option for overnight visitors. Our Liliputian rooms could barely fit us and our backpacks in, but we quicklyn escaped for the hills, and followed the steep trail across the island’s ridge to where the largest puffin colonies in the Faroes are. These very worried looking birds are actually nothing of the sort, some are so fearless you can walk up to about a meter of them. They were all squalking and protecting their recently laid eggs, hidden in burrows in the soil.

The walk takes you onto another island called Mykineshólmur, to get to which you cross a little wooden bridge over the Atlantic and surrounded on both sides by nesting gulls in the cliffs. Unlike the docile puffins these bastards like to shit on humans, even though they clearly know it would be impossible for us to hurt them from the bridge. The scenery was stunning, and got better and better as we reached the far end of Mykineshólmur and it’s 1909 lighthouse, being repainted by a taciturn Fare who was rather incongruously listening to Bryan Adams on his radio as we walked by.

I’ve been meaning to blog some of my more obscure travels for a long time now, conscious that many of my friends claim they are interested in what I get up to while working on assignment and also as, after doing this for several years, I find that many places, trips and even entire countries get lost in the chaotic filing cabinet of my brain.

And so to the Faroes. Gate 88 at Stansted (a particularly forlorn one, it must be said) gave me my first introduction to the Faroese, who took up all but a smattering of the seats on the cramped Atlantic Airways flight to Vágar, perhaps the only airstrip in the world on a hillside. The other seats belonged to me, Chris (my travelling companion for the first week) and a small British tour group of old dears. The Faroese, who were all very tall, handsome and largely blond, were without exception weighed down by boxes and boxes of Quality Street, Liquorice Allsorts and Jelly Babies. It seemed a strange thing to want from England, but hey – they wanted something and that’s a start, most Europeans want nothing culinary from the UK, so this was a mini-victory and I decided early on to like this athletic race of blond giants.

After take off the plane quickly escaped the foul bank holiday weekend weather of England and we flew over a sunny Scotland, a long stretch of sea and then descended for our destination. The fifteen minute descent and flight through the islands has to be one of the most exhilarating I’ve ever done – enormous cliffs on either side of the aeroplane shot up, covered in the lightest coating of green and the odd lonely sheep. Small villages were sometimes visible but these were basically vast volcanic extrusions, largely desolate and completely forbidding. This is why we travel.

Landing, we walked straight onto the bus for Tórshavn and the kind driver dropped us right outside the Giljanes Youth Hostel in the small town of Midvágur. Chris was mildly excited as he’d never been to a youth hostel. I, who had, was not. Our bags dropped and sensible shoes donned, we headed straight for the hiking trail around Leitisvatn, the country’s largest lake. It was 7pm when we set out, but the sun was still high in the sky. After a long discussion about what was and what wasn’t an outfield gate, we found the track and had a superb walk above the lake’s shore in bright sunshine. After an hour we reached the lake’s edge, where water simply runs over the cliffside into the Atlantic some 100m below. It was a breathtaking, and Chris conceded that his expectations for the entire trip had been exceeded on the first evening. We walked back, ate our ready meals and collapsed into bed around midnight, although the sky was only a bluish grey.