BAKU "And when foreigners come to this city all they talk about is the heat, dust, and oil; why do they not love our city?" - "Because they are foreigners" - Ali & Nino The Black Sea to the Caspian in one day. One long day. First leg - train from the resort town of Batumi with its semi-tropical coastline and sprouting hotel complexes, bonatical gardens and thunderstorms to Tbilisi, seven hours of comparative bliss on a shiny new el...

BORJOMI & VARDZIA After my exertions in the mountains, I decided to kick back for a couple of days in Borjomi, a quaint spa town in the southern part of Georgia. Producer of its most famous brand of bottled water which is drunk all over the country and exported around this part of the world, Borjomi is a great place to relax. Mini-bus from Tbilisi (all journeys in Georgia seem to start and end here, like the hub in the middle of a wheel), three hours o...

KAZBEGI - Mountains of Poetry The heat got too much eventually and I had to escape the city. Five days of searing temperatures, over 40 degrees every day; Tbilisi was a furnace, and I sought sanctuary in the mountains. Luckily, the mountains are all around you in Tbilisi, and you're out of the city in minutes on a 'marshrutka'. These little white buses are everywhere in Georgia - and the Caucasus and near east in general - and they are often the only option...

Baku, capital of Azerbaijan, the most populous of the three Caucasian capitals with around two million inhabitants, has come a long way since the unlamented collapse of the U.S.S.R, and having come through a period of bitter war with Armenia (over Nagornno Karrabach - which they lost) and power struggle in the 90's it is now run effectively, if somewhat undemocratically, by the self-appointed Aliyev dynasty - who don't so much govern Azerbaijan, as own it. It is ...

TBLISI Flying in, the first thing you see is the TV mast: a huge, flashing monument which President Sakashvili has, for reasons best kept to himself, decided to light up like Blackpool tower with flashing neon lights, a kitsch 200m symbol of modernity, of the city's reaching for the skies, and yet symbolic of its over-eager attempts to westernise at the same time. A bumpy descent - twenty minutes of being buffeted about - had brought on a bout of silent pra...