MAGAN'S WORLD; TALES OF TRAVEL ADDICT:EVERYONE should have somewhere they desperately want to go to but know in their hearts they'll probably never reach. For me there are two such Shangri-Las: the new Inuit nation of Nunavut, in northeastern Canada, and the apple forests of the Tien Shan Mountains, in southeastern Kazakhstan.
While I’m not yet ready to accept that I’ll never make it to Nunavut, I acknowledge it’s unlikely I’ll get to Kazakhstan any time soon – which only makes its draw all the stronger.
It’s the birthplace of my favourite food: apples. I love them all: curvy Rubenesque ones, greasy-skinned Magritte-green ones, bulbous baroque Rembrandt-red ones, even bitter Bruegel cider ones.
Every one of the 20,000 varieties in the world can be traced back to a single wild progenitor found near the town of Almaty (meaning Father of all Apples), just north of the Kyrgyzstan border.
If ever I do make it there I’ll head 1,200m up into the mountains southeast of Almaty to the Talgar Valley, where the forests are still lush with wild pears, wild plums, wild apricots, blackcurrants and raspberries, and where locals still live a paradisiacal (one of the rare occasions when a travel writer can accurately use that word) existence in tiny cob-walled cottages with felt roofs and rickety balconies, each with its own orchard and fruit patch thumbing its nose at the surrounding wild cornucopia.
If I close my eyes I can see it all: the cosy, ochre-coloured cottages with their bright blue doors and windows and a rickety trestle table outside selling wild mushrooms, apple-blossom honey, curd and every type of fruit and nut.
The conditions that made it so perfect for apples are precisely what attracts me: a lush, superfertile forest teeming with bears, deer, wild pigs and bees, all of which played a part in helping to pollinate, cultivate and nurture each generation of wild proto-apple until finally the King of All Fruit was created. The bears did their part by selecting the sweetest, juiciest specimens with their baseball-glove claws, which they then brought to their high mountain caves in the upland steppes.
From here wild horses and donkeys came upon them, developed a taste for them and, in time, carried the digested pips west and south into new regions. Then, thousands of years later, when the horse was domesticated, it remembered its love of apples and began carrying them, both inside its gut and in saddlebags, east to Shanghai and Xian and west to the Mediterranean.
From there it was down to Alexander the Great and the Romans, who ensured their cultivation in Europe by championing new techniques in grafting and propagation.
If I ever did find myself in that region I'd know exactly what to do and where to go, having armchair-travelled there with the late Roger Deakin in his book Wildwood: A Journey through Trees. I'd hike along the baked-mud lanes, nodding to the goatherds and bee-keepers I met along the way, shooing territorial geese out of my path and occasionally stopping to buy bread from the old babushkas who still bake with wood-fired ovens. I'd sleep under sprawling walnut trees and wash myself in streams in the company of Kazakh horsemen and achingly beautiful girls in bright red skirts.
Of course, this is all just my imagination. The curse of armchair travel is that it can awaken a desire that is difficult to satiate. Since reading Deakin’s book, a few years ago, I’ve travelled the route repeatedly in my mind. It’s likely that the reality would never live up to my fantasy, and perhaps it’s best I never get to find out.
manchan@ireland.com