Black Sea, brown bottoms As naked as the Med The Black Sea and the Mediterranean have a lot in common. They're both blue, for a start. And they're both almost cut off from the world's oceans: the Black Sea is enclosed by the Bosphorus just as the Med is by the Straits of Gibraltar. Naturism is possible on the Black Sea coasts of Russia, Ukraine and Romania. With more personal freedom, and hopefully a greater openness to foreign visitors, a naturist tourist industry should start in the region. If my own experiences are anything to go by, it will be a big success. It has all the potential of the Mediterranean, and many of the countries could badly do with the tourist income. My first experience was actually on an established naturist beach in Odessa. Not exactly the wilderness, but my fellow naturists had pioneered nude use in difficult circumstances. I also have to mention it because I was more glad to be there than I have been on any naturist beach before or since. It's quite easy to find. You need to get to the Chkalov health resort on Frantsuzky Bulvar (French Boulevard), a long road leading away from the central district of Odessa. I asked a taxi driver to take me there first time, and after that I could do it by tram. Simply walk for a couple of minutes through the Chkalov resort to the coast - there's a driveway you can't miss. Keep going until you leave the resort through a gate on the far side and come out at the top of a slope overlooking the sea. The nude beach is the furthest bit of coast on the right, just before some low, brown cliffs start, about five or ten minutes walk. As I lay on my towel in the warm sun, watching the sea sparkle and smiling as my fellow naturists walked past it was hard to believe I'd been under arrest just two hours beforehand. The contrast made the freedom of naturism, and the friendliness of other naturists, even more welcome. I'd entered Ukraine through a rarely used border crossing from Moldova, undergoing an intense and hostile questioning from a junior guard whose comrade stood by me, gun at the ready, in a locked room. Old habits die hard, and I was in serious doubt about getting into the country at all. It was proving difficult to explain why I was crossing into the country from the tiny self-declared state of Transdniestr, an enclave carved along the eastern border of Moldova. It is the only part of the former Soviet Union that is still Communist, and still technically belongs to Moldova. The tanks at the border posts, the flags flying from the lamposts, and the workers' slogans and monuments are living relics of the Soviet system, and as such are unique. I eventually won the young guard round by some shameless flattery ("So, it must be a busy job being in charge of such a large army base. How do you manage that AND YET still have time to become so fluent in English?") Anyway it worked eventually and we parted as old comrades after I gave him a coin bearing the Queen's head. A young woman sat facing me, her eyes closed, smiling beatifically into the sun as she went through a gentle yoga routine, lost in her own peaceful world. When she'd finished, she walked down to the sea, pausing to wish me good afternoon. Naturists were the only people in Ukraine who stopped to do things like that. I smiled after as she walked on to the water's edge, watching until her perfectly brown bottom vanished into the deep blue waters.

Odessa's naturist beach

The Blue Sea The wild, sheer cliffs of the Crimean mountains rise up to a kilometre or more above the sparkling waters of the Black Sea, a stunning backdrop to the beautiful deep waters. I chose Yalta as my base for my visit to the southern Crimea, a historic Soviet holiday resort. The town earned a place in history as the venue for talks between Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt which effectively laid the grounds for peace at the end of the second world war. The pictures commemorating the event show a cold, bright day in February 1945, Churchill pouting like Queen Victoria, and looking frumpy in a tea-cosy hat. They carved Europe into East and West and Stalin renamed two streets in Yalta after his guests. I was there, incidentally, on September 11 2001, an eery place to contemplate hatred being unleashed on a global scale again. Perhaps the greatest contrast to the incomprehensibly bad news was to be lying naked on the rocks by the beautiful blue waters of the sea, surrounded by naked Russians and Ukrainians who were as friendly and cheerful as any other naturist I've ever met. It's such an innocent state to be in, so defenceless and peaceful, so trusting and yet so vulnerable I can scarcely believe people find naturism offensive. In fact, a naturist beach was the only place in the whole of Ukraine where I felt truly at home, where the people were kind and engaging by default. Intriguingly, on my arrival at the monolithic Soviet-era Hotel Yalta, I spotted a naked man on the crowded hotel beach. He was pausing between getting changed, but seemed in no hurry, lying back on the wooden sunbed, nonchalantly smoking a cigarette. I thought for a second this was a nudist section of the beach, but he then got dressed lazily while his girlfriend hurried around packing up their things. It took rather more than a stroll to the hotel beach to get naked by the Black Sea in Yalta. For the nearest nude beach is about 20km to the west in a little town called Simeiz. You have to take a bus, number 26 from Yalta. Or if you are impatient to get there and can't face the trek to the bus station - and have a slightly profligate attitude towards money - you can get a taxi driver to take you there from Yalta. I think it cost about £13, which is less than any taxi I've got home from London, and you can always negotiate. As you approach Simeiz you'll see some rockfaces rising up behind the town; this is called Cat mountain, and from a distance it does indeed look slightly like a cat crouching down the hillside, its paws ready to pounce on a fat sturgeon in the Black Sea. Simeiz has two beach areas and you want the smaller one, which happens to be right at the base of the mountain, furthest away from Yalta. This picture shows you this second, smaller beach area, at the foot of the cliffs in Simeiz. The beach directly at the bottom of the public road is, as always, textile, but if you walk along to the left there's a very small and rocky nude area. There were about half a dozen couples there and a few families, who showed me how to enter the dangerously surging sea without being brained on the rocks. The second naturist area is further to the right; follow the road/path round because it's too difficult down at sea level. This is a much bigger naturist area, with more to climb around and better access to the sea. There is no sand but the flat rocks are great to lie on. The first bit you come to has lots of couples and families, and further round it's just men. I walked and scrambled about for hours on the hot rocks, climbing high up above the sea and looking down like a sea eagle on the brown bodies dotted among the boulders. I'd never gone nude rock climbing before, although this was more of a rock scramble, and soon I'd hauled myself into the wild unexplored foothills of Cat mountain. I stopped to eat a few figs from a small tree tucked in a little green enclave, pausing to let the sweat dry naturally in the warm sea breeze. I was at least 20 minutes away from the nearest scrap of clothing, and I knew my things were safe among my naked brethren. It was exhilarating to be alone and absolutely exposed to the sun and the stone, moving over the rock with more and more ease as I got used to unencumbered climbing. I was even barefoot: I prefer to go for all or nothing and soon I found my own ways of clinging on to the rocks, feeling for all the world like a naked monkey, all my worldly cares steadily receeding as my clothes vanished out of reach. I've rarely felt so at peace with a place as I did that day, working my way up to a commanding viewpoint where I could sit and survey the beautiful blue waters and feel the hot rock tingle against my bare bum.

Friendly Ukrainians at Simeiz, near Yalta in the Crimea

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