Step by Step

by Simon Reeve

  ‘The champagne shows the power of the Soviet military,’ said a waiter with a smile.

  Relaxing after our sweaty walk, I felt a sense of exhilaration. We weren’t just talking about situations from afar, we were engaged in them. Vials of anthrax, the Kazakh Beatles, the Sharyn Canyon, goat testicles. I was surprised what the BBC were prepared to let us do. We were having madcap Boys’ Own adventures. Whatever I’d thought the job would entail, I had never imagined it would be so brilliant, frightening and sheer, bloody gob-smacking, often all at the same time. Even when it was bonkers, even when we were walking into the madness of a radioactive waste dump, it was exciting and memorable.

  We drove on to Lake Issyk-Kul, the second largest and highest mountain lake after Latin America’s Lake Titicaca, where a scattering of resort hotels which used to cater for Soviet leaders had plenty of spare rooms. They were, quite frankly, a bit of a dump, yet the Kyrgyz government was hoping to attract adventure tourists seeking white-water rafting and mountain trekking. We stopped at one decent guesthouse which had fresh water and power.

  ‘Who comes here now?’ I asked the manager.

  ‘Diplomats, VIPs, and beezneez elite,’ he replied.

  ‘What exactly does business elite mean?’ I asked naïvely.

  ‘Beezneez elite . . . means . . . beezneez elite,’ he replied with a euphemistic smile. Organised crime is certainly a problem in Central Asia, but rarely for visitors. Local criminals are more interested in the rich pickings garnered from shipping heroin from Afghanistan through Central Asia to Russia and Europe.

  We were coming to the end of the first leg of our journey around the Stans, and we arrived at Bishkek, the sleepy Kyrgyz capital, from where we would fly home to rest, recover and plan the next stage of the journey. Our hotel was full of American special forces on leave from Afghanistan. While they lounged in the hotel’s dayglo casino, we headed for the national museum, an eccentric celebration of the Soviet past.

  The casino now happily accepts the US dollar, but murals in the museum portrayed evil Americans, one of whom bore more than a passing resemblance to George Bush, sitting astride nuclear missiles and laying waste to legions of defenceless women and children. Outside teenagers asked me in English if I liked ganja while they roller-bladed around the base of a statue of Lenin, still standing proudly in the main square.

  ‘We’re quite tolerant of Soviet history,’ said Kadyr, my young guide. ‘Many people think life was better under Communism.’

  The main consequence of the end of the Soviet Union seemed to be economic collapse. The Stans were left reeling, and most people I met longed for a return to the financial security of the past. ‘At least we knew where we were then,’ said Kadyr.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The Slave and the Tigers

  Landing back at Heathrow after finishing filming the first half of Meet the Stans, my first ever TV adventure, I was humming with everything I’d seen and experienced. I couldn’t wait to see family and friends to regale and bore them with tales from Central Asia.

  London felt strange and yet familiar. Going home to the house in Ladbroke Grove I shared with my friends Tony and Danny was particularly difficult. I spent days unpacking, washing kit, cleaning equipment and checking my notes from the journey for the script I would need to write for the programme. After a long and exciting adventure almost everything felt like an anticlimax. I wanted to get a megaphone and tell everyone what I’d seen and done. I wanted to share my tales.

  It might have felt to me like I’d been away for months, but in reality it was just a few weeks, and everyone I knew had carried on quite happily with their lives while I was away. Sometimes the comedown from a trip can be instant and intense. I remember coming home after finishing my journey around the Tropic of Cancer, a fairly epic six-part journey around the northern border of the tropics, and discovering the toilets were blocked in the flat I shared with my now-wife. The first thing we had to do, even before unpacking our bags, was get some gloves and wellies on, lift up the manhole cover hidden under the floorboards in the back room, and rod out the overflowing sewers. It was such a colossal fall back down to earth. For a moment I was pretty grumpy about it, but then I smiled to myself: going off on a trip around the world, or an adventure in Central Asia, is not a normal thing to do. It’s an abnormal privilege. Rodding out the sewers, washing my kit, or heading to the supermarket, is an equally wonderful normality, and it needs to be embraced and enjoyed.

  Once I'd finished my unpacking and washing after my first trip to Central Asia and when everything was under control, I sat around the kitchen table with Danny and Tony and shared a beer and told them a few stories from the road. I didn’t drone on for hours, I hope, even if I felt it was what I wanted to do, partly because I could tell the guys were keeping something from me. They looked a little sheepish.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I said. ‘What’s happened? Why are you looking like that?’

  Danny finally came clean.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘You’re going to find out sooner or later anyway. You remember when we moved in, we agreed that with three blokes living together under one roof we could never get a games console?’

  ‘Yeeees,’ I said slowly.

  Tony held his hands up. ‘I’ve bought one.’

  He shrugged. I smiled.

  ‘Rush of blood, out-of-body experience. Before I knew what was going on, I came home with a PlayStation.’

  We laughed. We knew we were all slightly weak-willed and had banned games because we thought we’d never get any work done. Danny and I were particularly bad. We spent the next week doing nothing but drive a car around London shooting gangsters. In a funny way, though, it was cathartic. We only ever had one game for the console, and once we’d completed it, admittedly by playing all night in one matey beer-fuelled session, we felt as if we’d been through some rite of passage where we had passed from being shallower twenty-somethings to slightly more serious thirty-somethings. Thank God Tony never bought another game or I might never have made it back to the Stans.

  Once we had finished the game, I had told everyone I knew about the delights of Central Asia, and had enjoyed a few nights of deep, deep sleep in my own bed, I was itching to get stuck into the preparation for the next trip.

  One thing was very clear, my travel kit was completely inadequate. I had just taken my normal clothing and basic equipment bought from a camping shop down the road. As a result, I had been cold, wet, hungry and uncomfortable. So I started sourcing new kit and compiling a now legendary (at least in my family) packing list that has grown over the years to be more than twelve pages long, and is divided under simple headings like: cold, heat, medicine and – most importantly for me – food. I have had to become meticulous, with long lists of stuff I might require that I can then pick from with each new adventure. What’s that old saying? Fail to prepare, then prepare to fail.

  I have come a long way since I was a kid who climbed into Glencoe wearing little more than an old cagoule. Since I started these TV journeys I have had to become, I now confess, a kit obsessive. In the years since Meet the Stans I have sometimes spent eight out of twelve months travelling and working abroad. So I can’t afford to forget anything, and my travel kit has to be just right: tough, light, dependable and functional. There is no space in my bags for anything that doesn’t work or doesn’t last.

  Obviously the kit I need varies dramatically from trip to trip. Travelling by road through a former Soviet Republic in the Caucasus during winter is completely different to boating through sweltering southern Colombia. But some old friends are always in the bag. I wouldn’t dream of travelling anywhere without a trusty Leatherman and a small, powerful torch, because – time after time – carrying both has saved my skin.

  In the capital of Transnistria, an obscure, exotic breakaway state between Moldova and Ukraine, where manhole covers had been stolen and sold for scrap metal, my torch saved me from falling into hellish, pitch-black sewers on unli
t city streets. In Botswana’s Kalahari Desert, obeying an urgent midnight call of nature deep in lion territory, a sweep of my torch across the bush revealed the silent approach of sets of shiny, carnivorous eyes. Thankfully I was able to scare away their hungry owners by smashing a spade into dry branches.

  Travelling for Meet the Stans, I took one huge expedition bag that weighed as much as a tractor. In the years since, I’ve generally taken two bags for the road: one duffel bag, with compression straps to reduce bulk and rucksack straps that mean it can be slung comfortably on my back, and a hardened waterproof case that can withstand a truck driving over it, or the outbreak of thermonuclear war. Sleeping bag, mosquito net, clothes and boots, all go in the duffel. Anything breakable goes in the case. It’s a bulky system that wouldn’t work for everyone, particularly gappers and backpackers, and it’s too much for a normal holiday, but even after Stans 1, I realised that on a filming trip I need to be prepared for almost anything.

  Trekking into Burma, illegally and undercover, from a remote region of India, while filming Tropic of Cancer, was a particular challenge that required new levels of kit obsession. With my colleagues Jonathan Young and Andrew Carter I travelled to meet the Chin people, who suffer terrible human rights abuses in a remote region of Burma bristling with more than fifty Burmese military bases. We tried to prepare for everything, carrying ropes, machetes, a medical trauma kit, camouflaged hammocks, locator beacons and food. We even had survival kits strapped to our thighs just in case we encountered a Burmese army patrol and had to dump our rucksacks and make a run for it.

  But careful planning and preparation encouraged confidence and ensured we were able to deal with all emergencies, major and minor. And the same applies to any trip. If you plan what you want to pack for a holiday well in advance, you won’t suffer the stress caused by last-minute packing as you throw your clobber into a bag a few hours before a flight. I now try to leave myself plenty of time to pack, so I can enjoy the reassuring feeling that I have everything I want or need, so I’ll be able to cope with any journey challenge, whether it’s making sure I have a book for a delay at the airport, or a compass on my watch strap to help me out of the Burmese jungle at four in the morning.

  I also don’t feel embarrassed that my packing extends to the inclusion of a few edible home comforts. Obviously, I need to be eating the local grub, wherever I am, because that’s a vital part of a trip, and a great chance to bank some memorable experiences. But from the second Meet the Stans trip onwards, I have taken squeezy tubes of honey, spicy sauce and Marmite to liven up boring breakfasts on the road, and a pack of tea bags for those rare and priceless moments when a hot brew can be slowly savoured. I might be abroad, in some far-flung part of our planet, but careful packing ensures that certain essential standards can be maintained.

  While I was faffing around with my packing lists after returning from the first Stans trip, Will Daws had been busy transferring all the raw footage to the editing suite, where the unsung heroes of the television process work their magic.

  I saw some of the rushes from the first two programmes and cringed. Not at the landscapes or the way it had been filmed, or the people we met, but at watching myself on camera and the way I came across.

  ‘I’m awful,’ I said to Will. ‘People will hate me. My voice is annoying.’

  ‘Everyone hates watching themselves on the TV,’ Will said soothingly. ‘You’re OK, don’t worry.’

  I hated watching myself then, and I still don’t like watching myself now. People ask if I sit down in front of the television when my own shows are on. No! Almost never. I’m too self-critical. But from the beginning Will and the BBC reassured me that while I might indeed be annoying, on balance I was probably slightly less annoying than many people would be if they were filmed. I took that to be a good thing.

  ‘And anyway,’ Will said, ‘we’ll be able to make you look better in the edit.’

  He had captured a huge amount of material on film, but it had to be funnelled and shaped into a coherent telly programme. What would emerge partly depended on the skill and style of the editor, who has an enormous role in the creation of a show. For several of my early programmes, that was Ryshard Opyrchal. He patiently turned my babble into TV I was proud of, and dozens of other editors have since performed the same alchemy. Nowadays we often have 60, 80, sometimes more than 120 hours of footage from multiple cameras that needs to be wrangled and watched and linked together. Editors sit with the producer-director, often in a windowless room in a basement, and have roughly six weeks to turn it into an hour of TV, struggling and scrolling through the material, looking for moments of clarity from the presenter.

  When the editor finishes a composer creates the music, then graders enhance the finished film so it looks glossy and inviting on the TV. Pound for pound nothing improves a programme faster than a skilled colourist sitting in front of a vast Star Trek-sized console playing with scores of dials and sliders like Jean-Michel Jarre, tweaking colours and shadows. Meanwhile back in the office there are production co-ordinators and production managers who help to plot the journeys, secure the visas and filming permits, book flights and places to stay, and generally keep an eye on the money. Series producers and executive producers run the journeys and get their hands dirty alongside assistant producers and directors with the research and planning for where we are going and what on earth we will film. Everyone is vital. Everyone does two or three jobs. Some of the newspapers might sneer at the BBC and claim there are too many tiers of management. I see none of that. I see tight, small teams and people working long hours.

  On Meet the Stans we had a young researcher called Shahida Tulaganova, an Uzbek journalist and fluent Russian speaker living in London who helped to put together the journeys and shows, and was then due to travel out with Will, Dimitri and me on the Uzbek leg of the journey because of the challenges of finding a guide in the country.

  Shahida was working with Will to iron out some visa issues, and then we would be back on a plane, heading out to Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. There was just time for me to sit down and consider what I had loved most about my first TV journey.

  The landscapes had certainly been epic. Standing and looking out at the Sharyn Canyon had been one of many moments I would treasure forever. The wildlife had been magnificent. As we crossed the steppe I had been captivated by a diving eagle. The food had often been strange and occasionally spectacular. I would remember all of it. Everything.

  But what had really stood out were the people. For me the strongest memories from that first trip, and from every trip since, are from my encounters with us, with our inspiring, intriguing, long-suffering, comic, clever and caring fellow humans. When we plan a journey I am always asking and thinking, who are we going to meet? Meaningful encounters with other people in a strange part of the world are the real experiences to treasure. If I’m not meeting people then I’m not on a proper journey.

  In Central Asia I was lucky to spend time with locals who were warm, generous and fascinating, and in the years since I have been blessed to meet folk who have been completely inspirational.

  Travelling in Kenya more recently, I crossed the great African plains and arrived at a remote Maasai homestead, and the mud-dung hut of a grandmother called Lucy. She was renovating and refreshing the hut, and I was press-ganged into slapping huge cow pats on the sides while Lucy watched and giggled so wildly she had to have a sit-down and a cup of tea.

  I loved spending a day with Lucy. Not because of her mud hut, or her traditional Maasai clothing, complete with colourful shawl, bead jewellery and stretched earlobes. Lucy was a proud cattle herder, but her mind roamed so much further than the plains where she lived. As we walked and chatted, Lucy bombarded me with questions, about my travels, the world, our cameras and my life. We were walking together on a vast plain, almost completely empty of humanity, keeping an eye on Lucy’s herd of cattle. I was struggling to get a word in edgeways, and then a phone rang. Lucy looked sheepish, then r
eached into her robes and retrieved a battered mobile. It turned out she would send a youngster fifteen miles to charge the phone each week, proving old Nokias really hold their power. On the other end of the line was her neighbour, standing outside her own hut half a mile away, squinting against the sun and wondering who on earth were those tall foreigners and where was Lucy taking them in the midday heat?

  Life for Lucy’s family was changing. She had just sold a cow to pay for her granddaughter to go to college 200 miles away to study travel and tourism. Perhaps one day someone reading this will stay in her hotel.

  Often the cast of memorable and brilliant people I meet on my journeys are completely inspiring. In Paraguay I met a woman called Margarita Mbywangi who had one of the most extraordinary life tales I have ever heard. She was in her forties, and she emerged from a dark hut in a community of the indigenous Aché people, looking ragged and weary. I found out later she had malaria, and although it had laid her low, she still managed to drag herself out so she could speak to me. She was barefoot, wearing shorts and a singlet and standing about five feet three. Her feverish face still managed to radiate calm and a deep warmth.

  Margarita was an Aché cacique, or chief, and one of the first female indigenous leaders in the country. Democratically elected by the community, she acted as their point of contact with the outside world. She took me on a walking tour of the village, past some young men who had slaughtered a pig in honour of our visit, while she told me her incredible story. She explained that the first real contact her people had with the outside world was in 1978. Within months trees were being felled, roads laid down and the Aché were being hunted and murdered by farmers and soldiers.

  Just a generation before, tribes like the Aché weren’t considered to be human by the Paraguayans. Human hunts were organised where ‘big game’ hunters could fly in to track people in the jungle and shoot them. I was astounded. ‘Indigenous people weren’t regarded as citizens until 1991,’ my guide in Paraguay told me. ‘Most of the hunting stopped by the end of the 1970s, but in some really remote areas it was still going on until the 1990s.’