Place

“People don’t actually do that, right?” my publisher asked nervously. “No one actually goes on a human safari, do they?” Eight years ago, I didn’t know for sure. There had certainly been rumors for years that wealthy foreigners were traveling to conflict zones to kill civilians at random. Gradually I had concluded that some people were indeed heading off to complete their bucket list of horrors. In my novel To The Lions, I placed the “human safari” in a fictional refugee camp in southern Libya. Concrete proof, however, was almost impossible to find. Several times during my years as an investigative journalist, I heard stories about nightmarish things going on in places where law and order had collapsed.

If you say the name Franco Zeffirelli to anyone under about 40, you’re likely to be met with bemusement. Find any opera or film lover over that age, however, and you will be greeted with a warm exclamation – “Ah!” – followed by a recitation of the Italian director’s greatest achievements. From his emergence in international culture in the 1960s with his seminal film of Romeo and Juliet to his legendary work on stage with such operatic titans as Maria Callas and Plácido Domingo, Zeffirelli became synonymous with tasteful, intelligent productions of the classics, all of which made him, for a time, the best-known cultural figure in Italy. It is fair to say that Zeffirelli, who died in 2019, didn’t always get it right, personally or politically.

I am in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan. I am standing in a historic complex of madrasas and mosques, courtyards and dusty roses and I am staring at the “oldest Quran in the world.” It is a strange and enormous thing: written in bold Kufic script on deerskin parchment; it was supposedly compiled by Uthman ibn Affan, the third Caliph of Islam, who was murdered while reading it. And so it is, as I linger here and reverently regard the Book, while scrolling my phone for more fascinating info, that I discover the world’s oldest Quran is actually in Birmingham. Yes, that’s right, Birmingham, England. It’s probably in some obscure library, lodged between a thesis on post-colonial emojis and a flyer for Falafel Night.

My personal version of hell? Shibuya station, Tokyo. Shibuya Scramble is one thing: the busiest pedestrian intersection on the planet, it sees two million people elbow each other, every day. But the train station that thousands of them are trying to get to? That’s where my hopes go to die. A place where you’ll find me near tears, wondering if I’ll ever see my loved ones again. It’s almost impossible to navigate, spread across a dizzying number of floors and stuffed with throngs of human beings speaking a dozen languages. New platforms spring up all the time, often at the top of an unassuming escalator, or via a tiny hidden exit of the Hikarie shopping mall. There are (one or two) signposts, sure, but my Japanese leaves much to be desired.

It was stiflingly hot in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I was exploring the eastern Galápagos Islands, living cheek-by-jowl on a former casino ship with a cast of characters plucked straight from a murder mystery novel: a former British supermodel, an Ecuadorian presidential candidate, the ex-drummer of a band who once supported the Who and an influencer couple who looked like they had stumbled off the set of Triangle of Sadness. The stars of the show – and boy did they know it –were the sea lions While the trip had all the ingredients to cook up an irresistible whodunit, I was not just there to inspect the wildlife on board but to observe the wildlife off it.

On a suffocatingly humid Friday morning in August, I sat in a rental car parked outside the home of Thom Robb, the leader of the Ku Klux Klan, wondering if I should knock on his door. A shirtless, muscle-bound, heavily tattooed carpenter who lived down the road – and swore he wasn’t racist or a Klansman – said Robb was “a really nice guy” who wouldn’t mind my turning up at his house without an appointment. Klansmen, I reckon, aren’t “nice” guys by definition, and as Robb’s mean-sounding dog barked at me from the other side of his fence, I feared the neighbor was setting me up to get my head blown off.

Southwest Virginia, October. Gravel groaned under my creek-numbed feet. I looked up at a mountain laid out like a fist and I climbed toward the most violent knuckle. But before I got there, the world turned on its side. I don’t know for sure why I collapsed. Maybe it was food poisoning, maybe a heart attack. I felt my face resting on cold stone and gripped the dark walnut of my rifle stock as I passed out. Eleven hours later, a new day started. A distant pickup truck with glass-pack mufflers fired up, then idled in a deep rumble. I stood – before the sun came up – and did squats for warmth, surprised I felt as good as I did, but I had a decision to make: walk off the mountain or hunt my way out. May as well hunt.

If you tell friends you are going to Kyrgyzstan, they look blank, or think you are talking about Kurdistan, although the two are 2,000 miles apart. If you get the choice, choose Kyrgyzstan. Like so many, I first learned of the place because of Alexandra Tolstoy: writer, adventurer, horsewoman and cousin of the author of War and Peace. She discovered the romance and beauty of the place for herself when she rode 5,000 miles of the Silk Road by horse and camel in 1999. Since then, she has ridden in Kyrgyzstan most years, taking parties of 12 or so into the lower slopes of the vast Tian Shan mountains, the highest range west of the Himalayas. Blonde, fearless and always elegantly turned out, she leads. We follow.