We were in The Doghouse when he popped the question. On bended knee, he made a game job of it, shouting above the clamorous hip-hop playing in the cool-for-canines Soho bar. That was more than six years ago and we never did progress to the ring/invitation/fall-out-with-your-family stage. The asking was, somehow, enough. That was until we reached Vegas.
Author: Sarah Barrell
From the ashes of the Baltic ghetto to where the earth breathes fire
From the sky, Baku seems to be burning. Giant torches from the city’s oil refineries are spitting fire into the night air, and village lights glow like embers below me. Later, when I step off the plane, onshore winds send the reek of crude oil – a cross between burnt rubber and school chemistry labs – straight into my face. This is how it feels to arrive in “the city of fire”, the capital of the country where oil-rich ground spontaneously bursts into flames that burn for months on end.
A tourist destination or a place to go prospecting for oil? Azerbaijan, in both respects, now seems to be waking up. For 50 years Baku was in suspended animation under Soviet rule. Now a new generation of oil barons is moving into the city’s crumbling mansions, hoping to pick up where the likes of Rothschild and Nobel left off. As for tourism: well, my guidebook, the only one currently published in the UK, points out that the Ajichai Valley, now in Iranian Azerbaijan, has been sited as the location of the biblical Garden of Eden. I confess that Baku, from the airport road, does not looklike the original paradise – but then again first impressions can be misleading.From the ashes of the Baltic ghetto to where the earth breathes fire
Escape from Sin City to the surrounding desert’s hot springs
We hit the highway at 90mph. Wind rushed through the jeep from front to back and we flapped through the outskirts of Las Vegas like an apoplectic air sock. After 72 hours of neon-lit, coin-fed catatonia, we had to get out, even if it was five in the morning. We strapped our bags into the backseat of the jeep, like two plump children, and made north on Interstate 95 with a kidnapper’s haste. Clutching a book entitled Hot Springs and Hot Pools of the Southwest, we were seeking a solace in the Nevada desert purer than Wild Turkey and more magical than blackjack.
They were out there, somewhere. Over millions of years the primordial folding and faulting of the planet’s crust, combined with underground water and earth core magma, has produced a geothermal flow, dotting this desert with hot springs. Long before pioneer settlers “discovered” them, Native Americans had realised that the desert’s “smoking waters” were sacred places. They believed the geothermal source water to be a gift from the Creator, who resided in the earth’s centre. And the hot springs were His Big Medicine, and a neutral area in tribal battles where all could freely heal their wounds. After 72 hours in Vegas, as the local Evangelical radio station put it, we too were “lookin’ for some healing”.
Sarah Barrell 