by Simon Reeve
Then we had detailed paramedic lessons from Terry, a serving firefighter, who described in gory but sobering detail the road traffic accidents he had attended around Southampton. ‘Every time I go to a crash I want to see a friction burn mark across the chest,’ said Terry, ‘because that means someone was wearing their seat belt. Even in a war zone your life is most at risk from a car crash. You must always, always wear a seat belt.’ It was advice I took to heart.
We trotted outside and Terry walked us towards some old tennis courts in the woods. Smoke was rising from two cars that had been arranged as if they had been in a pile-up. A group of instructors were scattered in and around the wreckage, wearing make-up and wounds to simulate a mini-disaster. They had fake wounds hidden under their clothing which spurted blood. We had to assess the situation, triage the victims and treat them as best we could. It felt surprisingly real and the whole course was magnificently organised. If only school had been as dramatically interesting. If you get a chance, sign up for a course or pay to go on one.
The whole week culminated in our entire group being driven to an army training centre an hour away and introduced to the fake country of ‘Hostalia’, where countless disasters befell us. We had to talk our way past fake road blocks, and stop apparently drunk pro-government militia gunmen in camo uniforms from taking away the female members of our group. We drove along a track and there was a huge explosion off to the side. A woman dressed a little too realistically like a Balkan peasant staggered out of the bushes bleeding heavily and clutching her intestines. We dragged her into the back of our Land Rover while she fitted and thrashed around, and then she bit into blood capsules and began bleeding from her mouth. I was quite taken aback by how lifelike it all felt. We later discovered she had been acting on Casualty that morning and had then raced down to the training centre, only stopping to buy a bucket of pig guts on the way.
Armed government soldiers stopped us further along the track, took the peasant away and shot her. We fled on foot through the trees and arrived in a full-size village where we found a rebel base and a moustachioed commander. He was just starting to tell us about life in Hostalia when a platoon of black-clad government soldiers mounted a full-on assault with mortars and small-arms fire.
Well, I tell you, it was all very dramatic, and not a little exciting. The day finished with an artillery strike on a United Nations compound and the resulting carnage we had to deal with: missing limbs, endless screaming and pints of fake blood.
By the time Dimitri and I drove back to London we felt bonded and ready for anything. Ten miles from the M25 we saw an accident on the other side of the road and immediately went into a response mode, remembering our training and racing to the scene. It was only when we got close that Dimitri pointed out there were two ambulance crews at the scene already and they would probably be able to handle the situation without us.
We landed at Almaty airport in Kazakhstan at three o’clock in the morning to start the journey around Central Asia. It was absolute madness. Even at that time, the arrivals hall was heaving and we had to fight our way through a scrum of people. Somehow our guide Bayan Orumbayeva was waiting to meet us airside to help us through customs and immigration. Bayan was a tiny, fragile bird of a person, with a warm heart but steel for bones. She could persuade anyone to do anything. Bayan had a way about her that people trusted. I have met hundreds of guides and ‘fixers’ in the years since, but Bayan remains my benchmark. She was exceptional.
Outside the airport she ushered us into a van driven by Marat, a former Soviet police captain who happened to have won the Kazakh version of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire, and we drove to our hotel. I had only just closed my door to catch a few hours’ sleep when two prostitutes with supermodel looks tried to push their way into my room.
I politely declined their offer, wedged the door closed and allowed myself a moment to consider the journey. For weeks I had been reading books on the country, poring over maps and wading through masses of photos. Our rough plan was to travel from Almaty up to the far north-west of Kazakhstan, by the Russian border, then travel by train, helicopter, horse and four-wheel drive across the vast Kazakh steppes towards the Chinese border, then south through Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan to the Afghan border, and west through Uzbekistan to the ancient Silk Road cities of Bukhara and Samarkand. Finally, we were on the ground. We were starting the journey. I was filled with an incredible sense of possibility and excitement.
On the flight over we had talked about how we were going to work together. This was my first outing as a presenter in front of a camera, but nobody had discussed what I should actually do in any detail.
‘Without wishing to sound like a total novice,’ I asked Will, ‘how do you think I should play this?’
‘You need to just be yourself,’ said Will. ‘We’re going to be filming for weeks. Nobody could pretend to be something they’re not for that length of time. So don’t play it at all. Don’t overthink it.’
That sounded like a good idea, but I glanced at Dimitri as if seeking confirmation. He nodded. ‘Will’s right. You have natural empathy. You’re interested in people, and you’re enthusiastic without being over the top. You’ve got a way of saying things that’s understated and that ought to work well. Just go with the flow and don’t try to be something you’re not.’
I thought about the simplicity of what they were suggesting. It made sense. It’s true I felt and still feel a strong sense of empathy with others. I’m interested in people. If I put myself on the couch doubtless I could trace it back to childhood, perhaps to counselling for teenage depression and even the talks I heard at church as a boy. Back then I had been listening remotely to stories from places I never imagined I would ever visit. Now it was the early 2000s and I was sitting on a plane at the beginning of what I hoped would be an incredible adventure, exploring a region that rarely featured on TV. I was delighted, elated.
If the style of my programmes was to be inspired by anyone else, I thought it had to be, of course, the great Michael Palin. Why not try to follow someone declared a national treasure? I watched Around the World in 80 Days when it was on the TV and it was a revelation. Michael showed respect to everyone he met along the way, treating them like fellow humans. Gone was the patronising amusement and contempt for local customs, food and traditions that TV travellers displayed before him.
On an old dhow in the Indian Ocean Michael sat with the Indian crew and shared the headphones of his Walkman. He sat down next to them. Not above them, but shoulder to shoulder, with no airs and graces, no Englishman and Johnny Foreigner. A shared seat, shared music; and then the chap next to him nodding his head to Bruce Springsteen. Michael never let anyone’s situation define them. He started to break down barriers and helped a generation of viewers dismiss the stereotypes that had plagued our view of other cultures. In a smaller way, a much smaller way, I decided I would attempt to do the same.
I woke in Almaty to a city shrouded in grey. It wasn’t depressing, nothing could have depressed me that morning, it was just a blanket of rain. Will put a radio microphone on me linked to his camera, I tucked it under my shirt, then we piled into the van and drove through the streets of Kazakhstan’s largest city, and until 1997 the capital. All around us were chilly, grey concrete blocks. Sometimes it was hard to tell the factories apart from the flats. It all felt very Soviet. Bayan saw me staring at a grim factory and smiled.
‘It will change, but slowly,’ she said. ‘I really hope this pro-gramme will be a pathway for future tourists.’
I nodded to her, but it was hard to be enthusiastic. The place looked bleak, and our first destination was definitely no local beauty spot.
Bayan took us to a complex of buildings surrounded by a six-foot wall with barbed wire scrolled across the top. It was an old biological weapons factory that had been converted to a research centre for the bubonic plague. Why were we going there? When the Soviet Union collapsed many military installations lost all their funding. Weapons
were going missing. It was a huge issue in Central Asia and something we wanted to incorporate into the programmes.
As we drove the camera was already rolling. This was it. We were filming. I made a few general comments and said whatever came into my head, Will filmed, and it all felt very natural. We drove through the gates of the research centre and the first thing that struck me was the lack of security. There were just a couple of guards who waved us through with barely a check on our credentials; no search of the vehicle and no sniffer dogs. Beyond the gate a series of tarmac roadways and paths drifted like tributaries through patches of grass littered with leafless trees. Marat parked outside a faded pinkish building, we got out, and Will readied the camera.
At that moment it could all have gone horribly wrong. Some people who are relaxed off camera go to pieces when a camera is turned directly on them and the recording light goes red. I’ve seen it myself regularly when filming in the years since. Will had told me to be myself when talking to the camera, but he had no idea if I would start to speak in a staccato tone as if I were on some live link on the ten o’clock news, or whether I would just freeze like a rabbit caught in headlights.
I felt confident I wouldn’t stiffen, but I stood watching Will, waiting for him to tell us what should happen next. He was the experienced director, after all. But he didn’t say anything, he just turned the lens on me. I waited for him to lead us in, but he said nothing. And then it struck me, one of those moments when a switch just flips in your head. Ah. So this is how it’s going to be. I need to lead, and the camera will follow.
It was a moment that set the pattern for the style I have tried to employ on my travelogues ever since: no script, no rehearsal, no lead-in, no real recce where a member of the production team goes out in advance and works out where I am going to stand and where the camera will sit on a tripod. From those first frames most of my programmes have been filmed in a relaxed, off-the-cuff style. I walk into situations with the camera rolling and take each moment as I find it. This might not sound fundamental, but many TV programmes are carefully plotted, planned and scripted in advance. Personally, I was never hugely keen on the more traditional TV documentary style where a camera is already set up in a room on a tripod with floodlights burning away, and the presenter walks in and looks around in surprise as if it is the first time they have seen the place. To me at least, those entrances can look just a little fake. So instead I try to make sure the camera and viewer are following me into situations, as realistically as possible.
Sometimes in the years since I have taken the idea of the camera following me to extremes. When I used a home-made zip wire to cross illegally from a remote area of India into a dangerous and virtually unknown corner of Burma while travelling around the Tropic of Cancer, on one of my most dangerous adventures, the team, completely understandably, wanted to send a camera ahead of me so they could capture me arriving on the other bank of the river inside Burma. We had the briefest of barneys about it at the time. I felt I needed to lead from the front and be the first across.
There will always be elements of creation and structuring in making a TV programme, but I was keen to make shows that are as natural as possible, and to knock on someone’s door, church or caravan, meet someone on camera for the first time and capture a genuine moment of surprise, as they wipe their hands on a tea towel or something, and then launch naturally into conversation. I craved that sort of authentic moment and interaction, and I have been incredibly lucky to work with cameramen and crews who have been prepared to film in that style. It might not sound much, but actually it’s a real challenge for a cameraman to follow me from daylight outside to relative darkness inside a hut or a house. As I walk through a door they usually have to flip through myriad settings so it’s not too light outside or pitch-black on the film when inside. Very few cameramen are entirely happy to do that without at least checking the light inside first because of the risk that the resulting footage might look slightly less than perfect. It can be a challenge for the team, certainly, and things can go wrong, of course, but the result, I hope, is the viewer gets a sense of a natural interaction and a genuine meeting.
The simple style of most of my programmes was set from that moment outside the plague research centre in Kazakhstan. Ultimately it was Will who made it easy. He just looked out at me from behind the camera, smiled and nodded in the direction of the research centre door. ‘Go on then,’ he seemed to say. It was the best instruction I ever had. I looked directly down the lens, said simply, ‘C’mon then, let’s go,’ and started walking towards the building.
We were welcomed into the plague research centre and shown around by a scientist who led us to a room where the only furnishings were a chipped parquet floor and a selection of old fridges. This was where the researchers kept their store of deadly diseases. Security was woefully inadequate, and the door to the main stock of biological nightmares was secured with a wax seal. So although they would struggle to stop intruders, at least scientists would know if stocks had been stolen after a break-in.
I could see labels on the fridges but the only one I recognised was anthrax. The rest seemed to be differing strains of the plague. The lead scientist unlocked a basic padlock securing the anthrax and took out one of four canisters. As soon as she opened the canister I went to point at it with my finger.
‘No, no,’ she said, batting my hand away from the vials of deadly toxin.
‘Did you just try to touch the anthrax, Simon?’ said Will from behind the camera.
The scientist replaced the vial again and shook her head at me. ‘We have to be careful, very, very careful.’
But then as she went to put them away she accidentally whacked the fragile glass vials. One of her colleagues gasped in fear. Everybody in the room froze. Nobody dared to breathe. For what felt like an age they rattled like a set of maracas. I thought they were going to fall and shatter on the floor. Fortunately, they settled, she put them away, and nothing was broken and no bacterium was released. But it was a minor moment of horror. If one of those vials had smashed I might have had a very short-lived television career.
Seeing the contents of the cabinets made the lack of security outside even more shocking. This was 2003. Afghanistan, where groups like al Qaeda were training terrorists, was to the south. Other militant groups were springing up in neighbouring Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. It didn’t take much imagination to see what kind of mayhem a determined group could create if they made a concerted effort to break inside.
Even if the facility had better security, the director of the institute was not exactly reassuring about the risk of determined terrorists obtaining biological weapons.
‘If I need to get a virus, as a scientist I can infect myself, then go outside, infect other people with the virus and then I can cure myself,’ he said. ‘I could do this if I was paid enough.’
He assured me it wasn’t something he would do, of course, but I couldn’t help thinking it was an attractive exit for a militant with designs on becoming a martyr.
By the end of the first day of filming I was buzzing with everything we had seen. I knew this was exactly where I wanted to be. The journey was already shaping up to be an unbelievable experience. On day one we had been somewhere bizarre, thrilling and frightening. The journey was already a privilege and responsibility rolled into one. It felt like this was what I had been looking for all my life. It was adventure with purpose, travel with meaning.
From the start we thought that by blending issues into the adventure, mixing the light and the shade, we might encourage people to watch the shows who would normally switch off or change channels when something about Central Asia came on the TV. Turning it into a travelogue might just be a way of getting forgotten stories and little-known regions of the planet onto TV. Perhaps it was my chance to make just a bit of a difference, or at least put a gentle ripple across a pond.
We flew north-west to an oil field that seemed to hint at the future. US firms were already working th
ere, as were companies from the UK, Canada, Russia and China. With huge reserves in the ground they had all bought leases as Kazakhstan threw off the shackles of Soviet rule. The Stans are home to some of the largest untapped energy reserves in the world, and the foreign firms were all battling for drilling rights to exploit oil reserves in a replay of the nineteenth-century ‘Great Game’. Optimistic estimates suggested the reserves could rival those of the Gulf States. It was thought oil from Central Asia could reduce Western dependence on oil from the Middle East and help to change the global balance of power.
Before there was oil, there was caviar. A few hundred miles south we were shown a vast, ice-encrusted lake where fish used to swim in huge numbers, and caviar was harvested, before the Soviets over-fished the prehistoric sturgeon that produce it. When I was there the only caviar produced was farmed. Abish Beckeshev, a Kazakh caviar expert (he was once head of the department for the central scientific research institute on sturgeon) showed me the lake and then took me back to his humble flat to meet his wife, who was also one of the world’s leading caviar specialists. Abish produced an enormous block from their freezer.
‘This is the finest caviar in the world,’ he said proudly.
He carved a chunk off the side as if it was meat loaf and spread the jet-black pearls on thick bread. The only caviar I had eaten before was cheap and definitely not cheerful. I dutifully put a slice into my mouth, and my eyes widened in shock. Now I knew what all the fuss was about. It was rich, creamy, with a tang of the sea, and completely delicious.
I gorged on slice after slice, then eventually noticed Abish was just eating bread and sipping vodka and tea.
‘I have been eating caviar for decades,’ he said. ‘I am actually quite sick of caviar.’
There was something a little melancholic about Abish that was echoed in Bayan. It felt like a throwback to the time when Kazakhs were under the Soviet yoke, and emotion and enthusiasm could be interpreted as signs of indolence or weakness. She might have been world-weary, but Bayan was an amazing guide. A day or two later we missed our train from the tiny town of Aktobe close to the Russian border after it left an hour earlier than scheduled. The next wasn’t due for days, but Bayan went to the home of the local mayor late one evening and hammered on the door. His wife answered wearing a dressing gown and nightdress, and then the mayor appeared on the stairs in his pyjamas. With a combination of guile and charm, Bayan persuaded or forced the mayor to drive to the train station with her, still wearing pyjamas under his coat, where he rang the central despatch for the region and ordered them to stop a train at the station in the morning to pick us up.