But the pair were double crossed by their body guards and what followed was a nightmare 40 days in captivity. They were forced to march into the desolate hills they were held in a succession of caves by a gang of armed men, all paranoically high on the amphetamine-like local plant, khat. The gang’s hideout was attacked by rival pirates, Freeman was subjected to a mock execution by one of his captors, and was haunted by the constant lingering fear of being handed over to Islamists who would undoubtedly execute him.

On 5 July, Frontline Club will host a discussion with Freeman, who is now chief foreign correspondent for the Sunday Telegraph. He will be discussing his experiences in Somalia, and talking about his new book Kidnapped: Life as a Somali pirate hostage with award winning journalist and filmmaker Inigo Gilmore.

Here we publish a short extract from Freeman’s book — a compelling account of one of his many days held captive in a dark cave somewhere on a mountain range of northern Somalia…

******

My stomach is feeling queasy. Probably the result of last night’s goat stew, or possibly our drinking water, which comes out of an old diesel can. Caveman’s Belly is one of the drawbacks of modern Stone Age life, not something they ever mentioned in The Flintstones. I can’t understand how they could have left it out: with so little else to do, answering the call of nature is one of the big events of the day around here.

So, the drill: first I grab my shoes, checking for spiders, scorpions or other poisonous vermin that might have climbed in. Then, stand up, with care. Lying on a thin mattress all day, you often get dizzy when you first get to your feet. Now, off to the bathroom, or at least the spot at the back of the cave that is reserved for that kind of thing. Thankfully, we still have a few tissues. The gang has told us that we will soon have to start using sticks and rocks.

On the way back, I pause halfway down the tunnel, where a section of the rock wall runs flat and smooth. If I were a caveman living here thousands of years ago, this is where I’d paint a picture of my clan out hunting an antelope. I pick up a shard of rock. I too am going to leave my mark here, something more permanent than a few cigarette butts. What shall I draw? A matchstick-men version of the kidnappers, with José and me as the quarry? Sadly, that will take a while, and if I linger here, the gang will think I have tried to flee down the pothole. Instead, I settle for some bog-standard graffiti: “CF was here, 18/12/2008”.

I stagger back to the mattress, and tell José what I have done.

A good move: we manage to squeeze at least 10 minutes’ worth of conversation out of it. This is the longest we’ve talked for a while.

Perhaps some archaeologist will discover my scrawl here in thousands of years’ time, I say. Or perhaps some other poor hostages will be dragged up here in years to come, and add their name to mine. Or, maybe, in 10 or 20 years’ time, if Somalia becomes a safe place to visit again, I will be able to come back, hire someone to help me find this cave, and see it for myself.

If I ever get free, that is.

Reproduced by kind permission of Colin Freeman and Monday Books.

After checking into the city’s main business hotel of the same name, a soulless but efficient Sheraton clone, we explore the town, famed for it’s Oil wealth. It’s the most modern looking city we’ve come across so far on our journey, but it feels somewhat empty, perhaps because of the blisteringly cold weather and appears to have about the same charisma as Calgary, another town that has rapidly expanded due to oil.

There are brand spanking new shopping malls and boutiques selling designer kitsch that only new money could possibly find tasteful, and several sushi bars that surround an empty main square where music is piped through loudspeakers to almost no-one at all.
Tuymen-ites appear incredibly proud of their wealth and show it off an attitude very reminiscent of Maggie Thatcher’s London in the eighties. In one of the Sushi bars we met a Yulia , a charming woman in her who happily boasted about how she flies abroad on shopping trips spending her husbands money and how they own 4 properties, one of which we later visited.

We also popped by a private English school that had just started it’s first term , for the children of resident foreign businessmen, which was temporarily in borrowed space from a local state high school. They only had 7 pupils when we visited, as the other families were keeping their children in Moscow , waiting for the new premises to be finished .
That night Adrian and I scoured around in the snow around the empty city for an Irish bar that took us forty minutes due to wrong directions from the hotel.

The only thing Irish about it appeared to be the awful U2 background music, and alas with no expats and a closed kitchen so we made our way back to the hotel, which this time only took two minutes and instead resorted to dining in the Hotel restaurant ,where naturally we were their only customers.
After another night train, I was getting tired of them by now, we were greeted by two eccentric play-writes in Omsk, our mission here was to find surrounding villages that were now near deserted as disenchanted agricultural workers moved to the cities, Tayana and Oleg did their utmost for the next two days to obstruct us in our quest in the nicest way possible.

With no malice on their part at all, it became obvious that they were in fact devout Russian Orthodox Christians who were under the spell Varvara, an 80 yr old Holy Woman who lived outside town in a monastery she’d had built independently from the church.
So our first day was spent at Chez Varvara’s, a collection of Log buildings, Churches and Chapels in a silver birch forest clearing about 70 km’s from town.
Varvara appeared after sometime waiting at the gates, dressed in a black habit headscarf and overcoat with the obligatory crucifix around her neck, which Tatyana immediately rushed over to kiss and then gently pressed to her forehead. We of course were also expected to pay homage, so I ventured forth kissed the cross and then bumped it with my forehead with a resounding clang , that probably startled the crows into flying out of the surrounding trees.

After this we were led on a tour of all the chapels and the main church and were expected to cross ourselves in front every religious icon we came across. I of course always got myself mixed up with the whole crossing thing, I’d in fact been thrown out of my local cub scouts as a child when my feigned Catholicism was finally rumbled by my failure to cross myself properly.
We then had a lunch of frozen raw berries, cream, bread, gherkins and chai , whilst Adrian made his interview. Our departure was further delayed by a few words of wisdom from the old lady for each of us and a hard smack on the forehead each as a blessing.

The following day went no better, and this time instead of an empty village we were taken to yet another monastery, until we finally managed to bully Oleg into knocking on a few doors whilst we were there. At one of these doors we met Lyuba a widow pensioner in her seventies who like so many others of her age saw her savings lose all their value in the economic meltdown of the nineties and looked back to the old days of Brezhvnev with rose tinted glasses.

That evening we dined at Tatyana’s, who lived in a Krushchovka apartment block in the centre of Omsk. Her apartment was chintzy in décor and adorned with photograph’s of herself dressed in theatrical Victoriana at a more youthful time of her life and others of her late husband who was tragically a victim of the mafia killings of the nineties. Adrian was immediately trapped by her best friend who bored him with more strange talks of mysticism and pretended to take notes whilst I did the other polite thing which was to eat the meal lovingly prepared for us, which consisted of a salad made of a raw frozen white fish, salami, potato and aubergine.

Afterwards we were treated with a VHS cassette documentary of a mass winter baptism in a nearby frozen lake. It was a bizarre evening but one I wouldn’t have missed for the world, and although the trip didn’t go according to plan we learnt a lot about the importance of faith to many people in Russia today.
At the train station it was an emotional send off on their part, after the hugs and blessings were over we left them standing on the platform at -10 degrees as we once again drifted off into the night this time bound for Novosibirsk.
a few pictures can be seen at the Daily Telegraph.

They shared with us their food for journey including a version of the meat pasties we’d been told were a Tatar delicacy in Kazan, we offered our cheese and salami in return which Galia turned her nose up at, but Konstantin an Athletic fifty something semi retired oil engineer who’d only recently taken up smoking, would happily sip our Vodka when he thought his wife wasn’t looking.

Yekaterinburg is the bustling capital city of the Urals region and was the site of the murder by Bolshevik revolutionaries of Tsar Nicholas and his family in 1918 and in the 1990’s suffered from open Mafia warfare on it’s streets, resulting in thousands of deaths, evidence of which can be seen in Shirokorechenskoye cemetery with it’s Gangsters row of gaudy marble mausoleums. We were greeted on the train platform by our next translator and driver duo, Sacha ,our translator , attractive and well connected with an easy going personality and Valery, our driver, a bit of a player from Moscow, who liked to drive as fast as possible whenever he could and had a rather comical Hip Hop dialtone on his mobile.

It had begun to get very cold at this point around -7 degrees , at least for an Englishmen anyway, and one of my Canon Cameras, ironically the pro version , had begun to malfunction after short bouts of being outdoors and I had to revert to using one camera for outdoor work, which was frustrating and meant having to change lenses all the time.
First stop was a rehabilitation centre for drug addicts founded by a state Duma offical with alleged dubious mafia connections, Yevgeny Roizman.

Here we were introduced to the enormous Sergei “Boxer” Kolesnichenko, director of the “Clinic of the Yekaterinburg City without Drugs”, who’s arms were almost as big as my waist. He gave us a tour of the facility, policed by musclemen in their twenties, who mostly claimed to be former “sportsmen”, a euphemism for a members of a particular Mafia “Grupperovka” in the nineties called Uralmash , named after the factory suburb of the city it came from.
Inside a caged room up to fifty men were handcuffed to their bunks, a technique used for the first 27 days of their stay, which is often an involuntary one.

Picked up off the streets by a team of heavies usually led by Boxer , and often at the behest of their friends and relatives, these inmates are meant to take part in a clean up programme which should last the best part of a year . Roizman’s organization’s other focus is on the clamp down on drug dealers in the city, although some critics argue that only non Russian dealers are targeted.
We stopped off in a hip restaurant for lunch in the centre of town, with modern trendy décor and “Back to Mine” style lounge music playing in the background.

The food was great, some of the best we’d had in Russia so far, not counting the Café Pushkin in Moscow, and gave our taste-buds a welcome break from the otherwise dull food we’d had so far.
That evening the old Communists were out in force, all of around two hundred of them, mostly pensioners, to celebrate the “Day of the Great October Revolution” once a public holiday, but now disregarded by the new regime, and renamed “National Unity day” and moved to November 4.
They marched down the main Lenin Street, as all main streets in Russian cities are called, and finished at the Lenin statue where they sung old songs, listened to speeches and reminisced about the good old days. Although the die hards of the Communist Party are now frowned upon in Putin’s Russia , not all of it’s hero’s and personalities are.

In recent years Putin has tried to rehabilitate the Stalin’s tainted image which was swept under the carpet by his successor Nikita Krushchev, and now four decades later the tyrant who managed to murder at least 20 million of his own people is now making a comeback and becoming a symbol of the days when Russia was a superpower. Now some of the crimes committed during his time in office are being glossed over once again.
A good case of this revisionism was close by to the next city on our visit, Perm in the Urals.

About an hours drive from the city is the infamous labour camp Perm-36 which was a labour camp for Political prisoners from 1946 until it’s closure 1988. It is now a museum and memorial to those that suffered political repression under the Soviet regime. Under new guidelines set down by the Kremlin in an advisory book for teachers not only is Stalin’s role as a dictator revised but also that of the Gulags, being painted as an unpleasant necessity for Russia’s security and advancement.

We met a teacher with her class from a local a school who were on a tour of the facility who felt that it was important for her students to learn about the horrors of the past and intended to continue bringing children there, she wasn’t aware of the new guidelines from Moscow.
I find it hard to believe that someone as evil as Stalin, who killed far more people than even Hitler could manage, could anyway be rehabilitated into society, but apparently he has a 55 percent approval rating from Russians in a recent poll. What can explain such a phenomenon? Have the Russian’s suffered so much in history that they can’t even differentiate good from evil anymore, or are they simply willing to bury their heads in the sand as long as they have a steady salary and food on the table.

Perhaps this explains Putin’s own extraordinary popularity in Russia, when asked in recent polls the incumbent President Is voted by the people as the “Russia’s Greatest Leader since the Revolution” and Stalin second. Hopefully I’ll build a better understanding of the Russian psyche during this journey.
Next Tyumen and Omsk.