There are four of us in the car. The road ahead is empty and the cameraman is trying to hide his equipment as we draw up at the first checkpoint. “You…tell them you’re my brother, that we are a family going to see our aunt in Gori. Just say it in Russian…quickly. If they ask… say you’re ID is back home…on their side of the Checkpoint.” I nod. This isn’t the moment for disagreements. She gestures to the driver. “Go slower you idiot…you’ll frighten the Russians.”

He isn’t listening to Irina. He is chewing a piece of paper he tore off the corner of the daily news and is listening intently to the radio. He clutches the steering wheel tightly. Irina sighs and stuffs her press card into the little box under the dashboard. She’s in her late twenties and is wearing simple clothes to pass unnoticed by the Russians. I think she’s probably nervous too. For the past few days virtually no Georgian journalist has been allowed into Gori. To my left a French photographer is drinking a can of Sprite.

“It’s really nothing. I mean…The Russians are so polite. These Georgians don’t know what they’re talking about. They aren’t shooting the wheels off cars like the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade. Seriously…boring war….this…You want some Sprite….You thirsty?”

I don’t answer. He crunches the can and screws down the window to lob it out into some trees. The air bats my face. Brown plains and barren hills are passing by at 120 km/h. A few cows are wandering around in gloomy serenity – but I am trying to calm myself down. I thought until five minutes ago we were just going to the check-point. My stomach feels a little unsettled. Pictures of TV News flash through my head. Then I realise there is absolutely nothing I can do about it. I smoke a Kent as we draw up to Russian lines. I suppose I’m trying to look ‘hard’ by pulling some kind of frown. I repeat to myself. “This is what you wanted…what you wanted.”

The Russian standard is flying 21 km from Tbilisi by a stream. Some soldiers are taking a nap. Others are re-enforcing earth dug-outs. It’s looks like their kit and attitude hasn’t changed since Life photographers snapped scenes like this is in the ‘40s. I feel like I’m inside one of those pictures. I open the car door into what I had only known from photographs. This should be in black and white. This should be 2D. The Tank is hanging over the side of the tarmac, three hastily thrown-together pieces of concrete mark the control spot. In the drizzle the Officer lumbers up and stares us up and down. A uniformed guy taps Irina’s shoulder and lifts up his early 2000’s Oakley sunglasses. There are large scars along his left-cheek. He smiles with unwashed teeth.

“Good morning….Pretty.”

So these are the ‘peace-keepers.’ You can see the Tartar in those long eyes. He holds an AK-74, spits out some phlegm and takes down the code on the number-plate. There’s no saluting, I can’t see a seniority system between these twenty-somethings. But he’s definitely in charge. Three of his men open the boot, push some stuff about and signal we can go on. They are quite polite and laugh a little idiotically when they find a bottle of cheap vodka in there. The French photographer keeps muttering under his breath. After a few minutes they let us through.

“Ridiculous. This is nothing. Not like when I was in Afghanistan -“

Irina pulls round and snaps at him. “How the hell would you feel if there were Russians soldiers – no matter how polite…21km from Paris?” He rolls his eyes and takes out some biscuits. “Want one?” He chews the chocolate all the way into Gori. He’s still being rude but has switched to French. “You see those APCs there…she’s afraid of them. I’m not. I’m a reporter…I see it almost like a toy. I want to snap it… Can’t be afraid of it….”

Tanks are loitering around the edge of the town like metal-animals. Young men are sitting on them looking rather bored. “You see…” The Frenchman mutters. “War is about waiting. That’s what you’ll learn.”

All is empty. There’s nobody home. The deserted streets eerily remind me of Christmas Day in England – just all the window panes are smashed in and a few apartment blocks are blackened. They’ve been bombed. The car bumps along the road. Irina shouts, “they used cluster bombs so be careful. You all know what they’re like.” I smile. I have no idea what a cluster bomb looks like. And rather stupidly I don’t ask. We park in the main square under the statue of Joseph Stalin. He was born in Gori – but musing about his historical legacy seems ridiculous when I can actually breathe it. Russian soldiers are on patrol so we push quickly into the Town Hall.

Soviet Baroque columns hold up a space crammed with the frightened and the confused. The wounded are sitting around dejectedly in the ante-chambers. Cuts, bandages and slings for broken arms fill the four corners of the room. As we walk up the stairs an old women is in tears. I don’t stop to ask why. The Georgian Governor is waiting for Irina.

He’s a young guy and has a nice pink shirt and a thick black desk in a room with a large conference table. Head in hands he smokes another Parliament Kingsize and coughs. Really badly. Behind him are his shelves. There are sixteen icons, a collection of knives and a framed photo of someone aiming a pistol. I Imagine he took it when war seemed like something fun. The Governor is sullen and spends most of the time scribbling down tank positions onto a map of his district and keeping an eye on the TV. Movements, pull-backs and new strikes are running along the announcement ticker.

“My country is occupied. We are resisting.”

I hear a grating laugh. Some journalists find that funny. Outside I run into the correspondents of the Figaro and the Sunday Times. These grinning men suggest I wander down to see the prisoner exchange. We arrive too late. General Borisov, the supreme Commander of Russian Forces in Gori is already leaving in his 4×4. He’s visibly drunk, is sweating profusely and speaks a foul-mouthed car-mechanics Russians. “Look guys…I’m getting my fighting boys outta here….just leaving some peacekeepers OK…? Just outside, right?” I ask him if the tanks there are going to be needed for that. He burps. Everybody pretends they didn’t notice. “Peacekeeping’s tough man. My guys are getting the fuck outta here tomorrow…. Don’t hassle me…I’m bu-sy!” The door is slammed and he hits the road. A piece of paper fell out of the door as he brutally shut it. Later that evening, the Le Monde Correspondent explains what the circles mean. It’s the new map of Georgia.

“They are occupying everything north of Gori and everything West of Senaki. For good. Or so it appears.”

Mirian wears ‘90s Reebok trainers, black badly-cut jeans and a lumberjack shirt of the worst imaginable quality. He is holding a rubbish sack filled with a few books, a family-photo album, more ugly clothes and a lock of his girlfriend’s hair wrapped in a green elastic band. He tries to speak English very quickly, over-pronounces the ‘o’ and fumbles around his meagre belongings looking for a blue lighter he claims somebody has ‘stolen’ from him.

His mother died last Tuesday, from bowel-cancer. Over the weekend a group of Ossetian ‘irregulars’ broke down the door of his father’s apartment and informed them that due to the strategic view-point their balcony offered over the town of Gori, their presence was now a ‘liability.’ One of them kicked in the glass door-pane of the old display cabinet to get his message across. He broke a china dog and a photoframe with a picture of his younger sister winning a local ballet contest. Sometime later that afternoon, probably when he passed out of his home town towards Tibilisi through a check-point manned by inebriated Russians, Mirian realised he had become a refugee.

Three olive-green trucks unload their human cargo under plane trees on the outskirts of the city. He lets his rubbish-sack of belongings drop to the ground, so he can use his hands to further articulate what he’s saying. I try to write down everything he talks about in my note-book, but I can’t record the shouting or draw his face. He stubs out his Yigor Light, looks for another one – but realises there are none left. Then his eyes stay still on mine. I stop note-taking.

“My cousin…was in the base…when they broke in and trashed it…he hid…in the boiler-room…and he heard them shouting…‘They’ve got everything…they’ve got all the equipment they could have dreamed of….and we’ve got nothing…’

“Then the Russians fell into a rage… they started to smash things up…their commander…couldn’t calm them down…and… and…they wouldn’t stop shouting… ‘we’ve got less than refugees…but we’ve won…we’ve won…we’ve won’

Then quite unexpectedly, he finds his blue lighter and begins to laugh.

In Istanbul the bus station is a multi-layered curved-concrete spiral – stuffed with little ticket-offices. Something that somebody might have found cool when concrete was young – or when they realised just how cheap it was to build. Outside each bureau a moustachioed man shouts out a destination.

“Adana” “Ankara” “Izmir” “Antakya” “Diyarbakir” “Kars” “Batumi”

Coaches are pulling in, people are pilling out. They’re migrating, trading cans for crates, lugging suitcases or picking up plastic bags of their belongings. Some are swearing as others rush to buy bits of food or bottled water. And then there are the goodbyes. Some tearful ones, some that seem more indifferent.

“Batumi”

So there are still buses to the Caucasus. An overweight, never-shaven guy in a stained orange shirt pulls me to the bureau. There is only one bus to Georgia. It’s his – and it leaves in twenty minutes. I don’t give myself enough time to properly make up my mind. Pretty soon I’m sitting next to Sofia, who begins to tell me her story in broken Russian.

She is looking for her son. His name is Soso. He’s seven and she hasn’t heard from him since the Russians pulled into Senaki last week. Sofia has dyed black-hair, more wrinkles than women of thirty tend to and a mobile phone. Soso is her background. Every ten minutes she pulls her Nokia out to look at him.

“I thought it would a good idea…for him to stay with his grandparents…I…I”

She never finishes the sentence. I sat next to her the whole twenty hours to Batumi and she could never say any more than that. At four in the morning the coach stopped somewhere on the motorway. Orange lights from the streetlamps flooded the tarmac. As whole families boarded, I watched colourfully veiled women holding their babies and fathers telling jokes to little girls. Sofia jumped off the bus. I think she must have been sick because when she got back on she was pale. Her eyes are Georgian, they almost have something Cherokee in them. She tries to explain;

“This happened to my parents…when there was a war…this happened…happens..”

The Turkish peasants are too excited by the bus to fall asleep. Children rush up and down the gangway. Men are strolling along talking to their new friends and seat-neighbours. None of them is going to Georgia. Sofia falls into a kind of sleep, but still every half-hour she pulls out her phone to look at Soso.

At the border the Georgian Cross of St. George is still flying – but little else is in the right place. Half the police have rushed off to the front-line, half the staff have gone to find their families. Papers are piled up, left unfiled, and nothing has been cleaned for days. An exhausted women stamps my passport without bothering to scan it. I can’t make out where her mascara ends and where the black rings below her eyes begin.

Dense-forests cover the mountain foothills nearby and along the road life-size rusted metal crosses occasionally appear at the cross-roads. We pull into Batumi. I saw Sofia pulling a wheelie-suitcase through rows of taxis and mini-buses shouting out the name of her village. Then she vanished.

All these buildings are cheap blocks of flats, painted ‘cheerful’ colours. The pinks and pale greens are greeting me. There is nothing in Batumi. Everything seems to be under sixty years old. Perhaps there was nothing here before. Maybe they all lived in huts. Maybe there was a big war that destroyed what was here. Maybe I’m right. I need an Internet Café. I need to get to Tibilisi.

The taxi-drivers won’t take me. Tattooed men wave their hands in the air.

“We can’t. The road is closed…there is War in on the highway…and I don’t know the mountain passes.”

I asked several times and every answer was the same. Groups of people are arriving in the main square clutching bags, suitcases and stacks of pots and pans. A handful of refugees has just arrived. So this is what the edge of a war is like. Confusion. A mess in which nobody know what’s going on. People are shouting each headline to those around them.

“The trains aren’t working.” “Are they moving to Capital?” “They’re withdrawing did you see the news.” “They’ve dug in.” “What did Bush say?”

The only way out is the airport. The driver smokes Chesterfields, wears a neatly pressed yellow shirts and grips the steering wheel with thick hands used to labour. He has four rings, only one of them from his wedding.

“The Russians are coming…and they’ve brought Chechens. Aren’t you ashamed – you British…that they can just crush this place you made so many promises to? You see those ruined churches on the hills up there… there have been many wars here.”

He points at the airport. The sleek new building shows that until a few weeks ago Georgia was a bold experiment in free-market capitalism and westernisation. The EU flags hopelessly hangs down its pole.

The main hall echoes to screams for a ticket. Somebody’s mother, brother, whatever, is in Tibilisi. Old women are knocking on the closed booths of the airlines. Children are crying because they don’t know what’s going on. I try and imagine Heathrow falling to pieces. Somehow there’s a seat for me.

Three policemen are sitting around smoking Parliaments are muttering intp microphones. They offer me a lighter, then a seat. Levan is in his early thirties. His eyes never stop moving. His face still has bits of shock stuck to it.

“I was in the Zone…two days ago. We were both there.” He points across the table to his friend. “And there was another guy from the brigade. He stayed there.” He pulls out his mobile phone. His Russian is thickened by an accent I’m unused to. It’s hard to understand. He clicks play on his Motorola videos.

On the tiny screen a column of camouflaged men are moving through the mist. He taps this moving image. “That’s us. They sent the police in when they ran out of soldiers.” A guy is smiling. Another is smoking. Somebody tells a joke. “You see there was mist.” Then there is a whistling sound. Tiny-sounding gunfire. The camera rolls along the floor and starts to focus on somebody who’s not getting up.

“He used to be the guy at the baggage counter.”

I once saw a happy-slap on a mobile phone and it disgusted me. A Turkish coach-driver once insisted I see the porn collection on his Samsung. But seeing death on a Motorola leaves me numb. As I wait for the delayed plane the policemen smoke two packets of Parliaments and then move onto mine. They are speaking to each other quickly in Georgian now. I can only make out a few words.

“Bush” “Shakashvili” “Sarkozy” “Putin”

Beirut – Around ‘Lunchtime.’ I need an Internet Connection, a number I have to call is waiting in my inbox. The Armenian Taxi driver coughs violently. I’m indifferent, he’s driven me way out of where I wanted to go, right into a dilapidated and run-down district that slides steeply down a hill. Flags of the Lebanese Forces ‘ex’-militia dangle from balconies, children are running around in little packs through the street, old men are sitting on plastic chairs outside their apartment blocs in silence watching the day go by. Small shrines to the Virgin Mary mark out which sect’s territory this is. “There’s your Net-Café Habibi.” A small grey and dimly-lit hole crammed full of kids and six computers from the early nineties. “Thanks.”

Achrafiye and those nice bars in East Beirut may not look like misery, but you only have to turn round the corner to find it right there waiting for you. The photographer I’m travelling with lights up, as a car blaring out the speeches of the Christian war-lord Bashir Gemayel swerves round the corner. The recordings echo through the roads that cut through the concrete towers, but there’s only grey sky above. The kids start to mob my friend, asking him repeatedly, “You Lebaneeeese – Lebaneeeese?” He nods, explains he works from London and that he’s keen to move back to Beirut. Then one of the bigger boys comes up to him, at most he’s 14, and says very seriously to him. “Take your family to London. There is war here.” Inside, the dial-up connection hisses and when my email finally opens, the number is there.

“Nayla Tueni. Will meet you in the Downtown in three hours. Call 08-90-90-78. Martyrs’ Square.”

Martyrs’ Square is the heart of Beirut and is the old dividing line between the mostly Muslim western districts and Christian East Beirut. Today it has taken on a different significance. In 2005 street protestors amassed in the square, eventually coming to such a crunch-point that on March 14th the decades long Syrian occupation was forced out of Lebanon. March 14th was just one day, but it has come to mean a Western-orientated political coalition of parties committed to keeping Syrian influence in Lebanon to a minimum.

The square is empty in the late afternoon, but it is filled with symbolism. On the side of the Headquarters of the Christian Ketaeb, also known as the Phalangists, there is a large mural of the assassinated leader Pierre Gemayel. Further up rises the large, modern Rafik Hariri mosque. This is where Lebanon’s assassinated March 14th Prime Minister is laid to rest. I stand underneath the An Nahar building, a modern glass-construction, with a large hanging bearing the face of the murdered journalist and MP Gibran Tueni. All were leaders in the coalition and paid with their lives for anything they achieved.

Gibran Teuni’s daughter – Nayla Tueni, is now the deputy managing editor of the An Nahar newspaper where her father worked. She’s in her early-twenties, I’m caught off guard – not just by how beautiful she is, but by how seriously she speaks.

I expected Nayla to talk rapturously about her father’s movement that freed the country from an occupation. But there is a tone of great dissatisfaction in her voice when she talks about politics. Nayla is often tipped for a bright future in this field, but she has no desire to be a politician for the moment. She explains, “We need a new kind of politics in the country, one that is no longer made up of blind followers, corrupt self-serving leaders and is actually interested in getting to grips with the social and infra-structural problems that make up real change.” It’s then I begin to understand, that politics in Lebanon is more mafia than party-political.

Nayla is young. And you can tell from experience that something terrible happened to her. I try and imagine what it must be like to lose a father in such a public, international-media-CNN sort of way. I can’t really comprehend what it would be like to Google my own name and see pictures of me weeping at my Dad’s funeral.

“I am worried about Lebanon,” she continues. “We do not have good neighbours. Syria, Israel, Iran. They all see us a political play thing. Not as a place. And this means people die.”

“What do you want to eat? The people should be coming…In an hour. We should probably eat before the party.”

My friend is sitting on a mattress rolling weak joints. I think she uses too much tobacco. There is a street of modernist buildings behind her. Some of them are Bauhaus (I can’t tell). They mostly look as if they were designed by the same people who made kitchen-appliances. Un-decorated. Sharp-angled. Functional. All off-white.

“We could order burgers?”

Sure, “I want a cheese-burger.”

“No. It’s a kosher place. You can’t have that.”

It’s a strange feeling in Israel, when suddenly keeping kosher goes from being my choice, to somebody else’s. In the end we never ordered the burgers. And the guests started to arrive. People greet each other over-exuberantly. But like any party, things begin a little awkwardly. There is always the gap between what is supposed to be happening, namely ‘fun,’ and what you usually end up with. A group of people with problems who have just come out of class, work or whatever, with problems communicating and a very poor grasp of what is actually ‘cool.’

Somewhere in the ‘60s, they discovered a quick cure all for this. Class A drugs that could make everyone smile very quickly, regardless of what was going on. I might as well be in Oxford. There’s the same music you’re never sure who actually likes and the same stilted conversations about ‘art’ that degenerate into earnest chats about girls or reality TV.

I know these situations, apart from the fact this one is Israeli. Around me twenty people are cutting lines of MDMA. A yellowy-crystal crunched under credit-cards.

“So you’re leaving tomorrow? They tell me. Where are you going?”

“Lebanon, actually. I’m flying to Jordan and going via Syria.”

Ron is speaking to me. A man of very measured movements and real 2003-chic of white iPod headphones over a black T-shirt.

“I’ve been to Lebanon. All us guys went there together.”

A few guests are lounging in a corner. Looking a little gone, a classic dread-locked white guy is dancing stupidly in the centre. Familiar kinds of conversations. Druggies like to talk about childhood memories, music or other drugged experiences. Everywhere – it seems.

I don’t want to talk. I have nothing to say, so I sit somewhere quiet. A girl is sitting in front of the TV. Her eyes have no irises, and she hiccups slightly. I think I see her eyes role in the back of her head. Maybe, I didn’t. I’m not sure. Red-brown hair curls over headphones. They thud softly, then cut-out. Child-like she plays with a blanket. And swallows more pills.

I don’t know who switched on the TV. It wasn’t me, I was sitting next to her on the blanket. It takes a second for me to focus on the blueish-screen. Hebrew lettering is running along the ticket-tape. The in-human voice of the news-reporter draws no breath. An Israeli tank is rolling over a car in an Arab slum. It must be Gaza. I make out the lettering on the side of the armed-unit. Shai-6.

I was next to her then. She stopped playing with the blanket. Hiccupped. And began to shout.

“That’s my boyfriend…That’s his tank…That’s Yo’gev.”

Nobody calmed her down. I think somebody must have given her some valium, because she did go to sleep for a long time.