Tales from my travels

On the road to nowhere

Terrorism expert Simon Reeve travelled to places that don't officially exist for his new TV series and found it a humbling experience

How did you get into travel?
My childhood holidays were usually to Studland Bay in Dorset. We rarely went abroad. Until I was 18 or 19 I had only really been to France and Switzerland. It was mainly through work that I started travelling properly. In the late Nineties I wrote a couple of books on terrorism and did a lot of travel for that. I like finding out about new places.

So how did you come to visit these places that don't officially exist?
A friend of mine mentioned that he had done business with some Somalilanders and to my shame I really didn't know where or what Somaliland was. I looked into it and discovered that there are dozens of these unrecognised nations around the world. If you look at a map of Somalia, you won't see a country called Somaliland in the north of it, but if you go there you find that there is a functioning state. It has a president, a very lively parliament, policemen and all the organs of a state, but no international recognition. I visited five of these places for the BBC: Somaliland, Transdniestria (between Moldova and Ukraine), Taiwan, Georgia and Nagorno Karabakh, which is in south-west Azerbaijan and connected by a single road to Armenia.

Did you ever feel under threat in these places?
My number one travel safety tip is not what you'd expect: it's to always wear a seatbelt. Risk is all relative. I never felt personally under threat, except perhaps in Mogadishu - it is probably the most dangerous city in the world, and there wasn't a moment I was there when I didn't feel desperately sorry for the people who live there. In Somalia they have no real government, no police force, no real sense of order. The place is ruled by warlords. It's tragic, especially when you look at the old postcards of Mogadishu. It was a beautiful city with Italian architecture and so on. Somaliland was devastated by civil war in the late 1980s and early 90s and tens of thousands died there, 50,000 in the capital Hargeisa alone. So the country was laid to waste. It's very humbling to see a country being built from nothing with little help from the outside.

Are these really places people could visit?
It would take a more independent, resourceful traveller to go to Somaliland than it would to Taiwan, but these are fascinating places. Visiting somewhere such as Transdniestria, you are going to get a very memorable experience, but it's not easy travel. One night we were detained by the Transdniestrian KGB for spying!

In your programmes you seem to meet fascinating people. Generally were you welcomed in these places?
If somebody turned up at my house from Moldovan TV and stuck a camera in my face, I wouldn't be very welcoming. So I was amazed by how willing people were to talk to me in front of a camera. Generally, people were pleased that we were taking an interest precisely because they feel that many of these places have been forgotten by the rest of the world. In Transdniestria, I met a guy who had sold a kidney to buy a cow - can you imagine? How can you ever look at your own life and think you've had a bad time? It's humbling, especially in a country like that, which is on the border of Europe. You realise just how lucky you are. My guide in Somaliland was a war hero called Yusuf Abdi Gabobe who fought with the Somaliland resistance. He had lived in the bush for 10 years and talked to us about fighting against a dictatorial regime. Everywhere we went, where they had hardly seen white people, they would stand open-mouthed and then see Yusuf and start cheering - 'Yusuf, the great hero!' Somaliland was my favourite place because of the spirit of the people. It was a really moving experience.

· Holidays in the Danger Zone: Places That Don't Exist begins on BBC2 on Wednesday 4 May at 7.30pm.

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