BY THE TIME I HAD HIT MY LATE twenties my first, eventful but short-lived marriage was over and I was a single mother to a toddler and a baby. It was shocking, but also exhilarating, since the future lay entirely in my hands. I was working as a freelance journalist and wrote in the pockets of time I found when the children were napping, or late at night after they’d gone to bed. Life as a single mother was precarious but also exciting and, as a travel journalist, I was also lucky to have regular trips away on my own, to contemplate my life and where I wanted it to take me.
PHOTOGRAPH: PHILIP LEE HARVEY
Just before I turned 30, I met a Russian acrobat working for a summer in England. He seduced me with urgent, romantic stories of his homeland in North Ossetia, deep in the Caucasus mountains, in wildest, most remote southern Russia. When his visa ended and he asked me to visit him in Russia, I knew I had to go.
As a journalist, I also jumped at the chance to write about the Caucasus, since it’s an almost mythical region, sometimes described as the Garden of Eden, a place that few Western tourists visit. Two months later, with my children spending holidays with their father, I hugged them tightly then flew to Moscow, meeting my acrobat at Domodedovo Airport, and from there we boarded a train to Vladikavkaz.
As the train snaked across the steppe, I felt something inside me shifting. I was leaving behind my everyday life, bound by school runs and work deadlines, and entering a completely new world. It was exciting, and as the train stopped at increasingly remote stations south of Moscow, traders boarded, selling gold chains, pots of honey, finely spun cashmere scarves and bags of spiced pastries. A day later, at Rostov-on-Don, soldiers bound for Chechnya boarded. The travellers I met on the train displayed a kind of unquestioning sense of hospitality and generosity I’d never really experienced before. There were card games, late-night shots of vodka, coffees on freezing platforms. My Russian was very basic, but this was, unquestionably, the most exciting, eye-opening journey of my life.