I was recently in Ramallah, and turned down the offer of a lift to Jerusalem in favour of taking the public bus – just to see what it was like (the luxuries of being a tourist). All traffic between Ramallah and Jerusalem has to pass through the Israeli military checkpoint at Qalandia (or Kalandiya, Qalandiya, etc). It was quite an experience. I’d suggest every tourist in Jerusalem should try it out for themselves. (I’m going to keep my commentary to a minimum here and let the pictures talk for me).
This (right) is one of the approaches to Qalandia.
Pictured below is a section of the ‘separation barrier‘ at Qalandia, decorated with murals.
This (below) is what you see on the road from Jerusalem into Ramallah, having passed through Qalandia. The painted sign says “No entry to Israelis” in Hebrew (Israeli citizens are forbidden from entering Ramallah, which is controlled by the Palestinian Authority).
Traffic trying to cross Qalandia from Ramallah into Jerusalem is often heavy.
Having left Ramallah, buses arrive at the entrance to Qalandia, where everybody has to get off with their bags, walk across a parking area and into this shed (below), to pass into a narrow barred passageway, wide enough for one person at a time.
Passengers from the bus are then corralled together in this holding pen (below). The barred turnstile at the far end is controlled by the Israeli army staff, who sit in a secure office just beyond: they allow one person at a time through the turnstile for checks. The rest must stand and wait. On the day I was there, I waited in this area for about 15 minutes, shuffling forward slowly one person at a time. People were courteous but quiet. Fortunately it was a cool day: there is no air-conditioning there.
This (below) is the notice on the other side of that turnstile: each person allowed through must pass their ID card (or, in my case, passport) through a transfer window for checking by the Israeli army staff.
I could not take photos of the ID check, but on that particular day, that particular office was staffed by four people – three women and one man – all in army uniform and all, in my estimation, in their late teens or early twenties. One was seated at the window, running computer checks on the ID of the people passing through the turnstile; as she worked, she also leaned back, smiling and chatting with her colleagues, who were lounging behind – one woman was reclining in an office chair with her boots up on the desk, while the man was seated on a desk nearby, his feet on a chair, chatting and laughing.
After I passed in front of the window, there was a sudden shouted command which came out of a speaker on the wall. I turned, the person who was coming just behind me shrank back, and the shout came again. The soldier at the window merely wanted me to show my passport again – but it was (how can I put this?) disconcerting, in that context, to have a disembodied voice suddenly issuing shouted commands at me through a crackly speaker.
After the ID check you walk on. Pictured below is the sign which hangs above this passageway; it says “Israel” in Hebrew and Arabic.
Turning right at the sign, as instructed, this is the view (below) – another turnstile.
Through that turnstile, you effectively enter Israel proper. This is the scene (below) – another watchtower, with more people and traffic waiting to pass into Ramallah.
Everybody reboarded the bus, which continued on its way into East Jerusalem.
For them, it was routine: they presumably do the same thing twice (or more) a day, every day. Perhaps, since the crossing only took about 20 minutes and nobody was singled out for body or property searches, it was a good trip.
It was the most shocking bus journey I’ve ever taken. Qalandia is a disgrace: it feels, looks and smells like a prison. The casual behaviour and jokey attitude of the Israeli soldiers running ID checks was disgusting. (Then again, perhaps it fits: imagine soldiers making eye-contact with everyone and smiling, saying please, thank you and have a nice day. It’s almost worse than the honest reality of treating people like cattle.)
And Qalandia is only one of dozens of similar military checkpoints, set up in and around the West Bank in order for Israel to control the movement of Palestinians.
It brutalises – but I wonder if it isn’t brutalising Israelis even more than Palestinians.
While I was waiting in that holding pen, it struck me that when Palestinians are one day governing themselves in a fully autonomous State of Palestine, Israelis will still be living with the insidious, corrupting mental and social consequences of having maintained such an occupation for so long.
I’m absolutely certain that the Palestinians can survive the occupation, however long it continues. They seem to have the kind of inner strength and collective resolve that no army can touch.
What I’m less sure about is whether the Israelis can.
Martyrs' Statue, Beirut
Really enjoyed my return visit to Beirut earlier this month. I don’t really like cities, but Beirut is always memorable.
At the time I tweeted: “Beirut is a great place to try & figure out how cities self-perpetuate (and prosper) despite lacking sane central authority.” That’s what it felt like: more than any other city I know, Beirut feels like a collection of individuals thrown into the mix together and jostling along working things out day by day. To a know-nothing journalist, floating along as an outsider for a few days, I got no sense of collective endeavour or sense of community. It felt directionless – and that was compounded by the megalopolitan redevelopment of the downtown area, where vast areas of what was central Beirut – damaged beyond repair in the civil war – have been bought up by the Solidere corporation, bulldozed and are still in the process of being redeveloped for upscale residential and business use. They form a ghost town of quiet and luxury amid the rambling disorder of the city all around.
To get a handle on how things have changed since I was last here, several years ago, I joined Be Beirut – the city’s only guided walking tour (and the only such initiative anywhere in the Middle East, to my knowledge). I loved it. Led by Ronnie Chatah, we walked for five hours through West Beirut to the shot-up Holiday Inn, then into the Solidere’s ‘central district’ to end, poignantly, at the small garden dedicated to Lebanese journalist Samir Kassir. Ronnie really knows his stuff: his explanations at various stops were fascinating, from tales of the old civil-war days around the cafes and cinemas of Hamra, to the Armenian Haigazian University, the Magen Avraham synagogue (currently under restoration), the Hariri-built Al-Amin Mosque – all very engaging.
Two small criticisms: five hours is an hour too long, and since the company does a separate culinary walk around Gemmayzeh and Achrafieh, our tour did not go into East Beirut at all – a serious omission. That aside, this was a perfect reintroduction to what was, for me, a half-remembered city. (And, in case you were wondering, this is not a sponsored endorsement: even though I was on assignment I paid my own hard-earned cash to join the tour…)
More from me on Beirut later.
I’m not much into branding – especially for countries – but even I quite like this logo, devised to promote Oman and unveiled late last year.
The beauty of it is that it doesn’t need any explanation: the swirls and shapes have an arabesque feel to them already, so even without the text you could guess that this was something to do with Arabia.
The curls and coils hint at the prow of a ship moving through the waves, evoking Oman’s maritime heritage. And they double up as wisps of smoke, evoking the importance of frankincense and perfumes in Omani culture.
Cleverest of all, those four coloured wisps spell out ‘Oman’ in Arabic: an ayn (‘o’) on the right, the twine at the bottom making a meem (‘m’), then a blue alif (‘a’) and a curly noon (‘n’) top left.
I could do without the blobby, excessively expanded English font – something a little more universal, and a little less contemporary metropolitan, might have been nice – but it’s a small quibble.
To my mind, this Omani logo is an unexpected success: atmospheric, interesting and attractive.
Rather like the country itself.
It’s been a(nother) phenomenally busy time. After a string of writing deadlines, which filled the Christmas/New Year break, I’ve just got back from ten days in Lebanon and Jordan to discover that work lined up for Jan and Feb which would have paid almost £3,500 has fallen through – and then today I’ve also had to turn down offers of more work from two major publishers totalling around £15,000, simply because of lack of time this year (several prior commitments)… So you’ll excuse me if I’m not in the best of moods right now.
The Treasury, Petra
While I was in Jordan last week, I made an incognito visit to Petra. This has always been by far the priciest of Jordan’s tourist attractions: where most other sites cost a few dinars to get in, Petra cost 21 JD (£18/$30) for a one-day ticket, 26 JD (£23/$37) for two days, 31 JD (£27/$44) for three or more days. That’s only for ‘foreigners’: Jordanians, expat residents and Arab nationals pay 1 JD a day. Debating the rights and wrongs of that is for another time and place.
Some people, of course, like to take a guide – you could drop into the Visitor Centre at the entrance gate and book a guide on the spot: 20 JD for a straightforward trot through the main sights of Petra (2.5 hours) or 50 JD for a full-day tour.
As you walk into the site, there are also local people offering horses to ride. In the old days you could ride a horse all the way through the Siq canyon into the heart of the ancient city – that was great, a really exciting, memorable experience. But it also, of course, degrades the site’s terrain to have hundreds of people galloping horses around every day, and so, back in the 90s, it was decreed that tourists could only ride horses for the 700m or so from the ticket gate down to the Siq entrance, where everybody had to dismount. If you still wanted to do this short ride, the fee was fixed recently at 7 JD – but then you had to run the gauntlet of the handlers (who were hardly ever the horse-owners) trying to wheedle extra tips out of you.
Astronomic price rises
Now USAID has been brought in as consultants to reorganize how tourists experience Petra. What I discovered last week amounts not only to astronomic price rises, but a shockingly corrupt system of backhanders being written into law.
As of 1st January this year, the Petra authorities are forcing everybody who enters Petra to pay a compulsory surcharge covering the cost of a guide and a horse-ride, regardless of whether they use those services or not.
In addition they are splitting tourist visitors into two classes. Regular tourists – defined as those who stay overnight in Jordan – now pay 33 JD (£29/$47) admission for one day, JD38 (£33/$54) for two days, JD43 (£37/$61) for three or more days.
From 1st November 2010 those prices rise again, to JD50 (£43/$71), JD55 (£48/$78) and JD60 (£52/$85). That’s a heck of a lot of money: a family of four wanting to visit Petra for a couple of days now faces a bill of almost £200 for the entry ticket alone.
“Day Visitors” (presumably defined as those tourists who do not stay overnight in Jordan) are hit even harder. They must pay JD40 (£35/$56) until end-Feb, JD60 (£52/$85) from March till October, and then from November onwards a staggering JD90 (£78/$127) per person simply to get a one-day ticket to enter Petra. A family of four who have booked a holiday in Egypt and who choose to make a daytrip to Petra now face a staggering £312 fee simply to get into the ancient site.
The authorities have clearly decided that people who want to see Petra will be willing to pay any price to do so. That’s quite a gamble.
And how are the staff at the Petra ticket desk going to differentiate between a “Day Visitor” and someone who has a hotel booked (in Amman, say) for that night?
More to the point, why should I be forced to subsidise the horse-owners and tour-guides of Petra when I do not wish to avail myself of their services?
This is a country whose average salary is under $7000 a year and which is – let’s face it – only very modestly equipped in terms of tourist infrastructure, though it makes great play of its hospitable welcome to visitors. With these changes Jordan is now, quite overtly, setting out to screw as much money out of its tourists – instead of, for instance, concentrating on developing a decent range of attractions and fostering local private-sector investment in tourism to offer a broader, more mature national product.
Petra needs an overhaul, sure. Daytrippers who visit Petra from Egypt or Israel, then go back across the border the same day, spending virtually nothing in Jordan, are a problem. But will punitive entry prices solve it? Why not make Jordan more attractive, to entice people to stay longer?
Proposals for more toilets on-site, better interpretation and new transport services in & out are welcome. But why such a massive price-hike to fund them? Petra had more than 800,000 visitors in 2008, who brought more than $21 million in ticket receipts for this one site, in one year alone, in a developing-world country. $21m buys a lot of portaloos. Where has that money gone?
The worst is that the authorities have decided to line the pockets of Petra’s horse-owners with gold. These people – and the handlers who hold the reins – provide a dreadful introduction to Petra. The horses are hardly prime physical specimens. The stables beside the path stink. As of last week the handlers were still demanding “tips” from tourists, despite now being paid directly from ticket receipts.
Petra – though the most impressive ancient site in Jordan – is my least favourite Jordanian experience. It’s a hustle, and it just got worse.
There’s been a great debate over on Jeremy Head’s Travelblather blog, which started off as a proposal for a new way to fund travel writing, but which – in the comments – has shifted over, at least partly, into the old familiar barney about the differences (if any) between bloggers and journalists.
One comment on Travelblather is particular telling: Pam, who blogs at Nerd’s Eye View, says she’s tired of travel journalists calling themselves professional. “What does that mean, anyway?” she asks. I agree it’s a tough term to define; after all, unlike the ‘professions’ of law, medicine and so on, you don’t have to pass an exam to be a travel journalist. Anyone can try their hand at it – like photography.
I’m a photographer, but I consider myself an amateur: I carry a fairly decent camera with me when I’m working, and have had dozens of photos published – from low-res national newspapers to full-page bleeds in high-quality glossy magazines – but a real photographer would instantly be able to tell that I’m actually not much good. I can do composition, and the very best of my pics are worth a look, but technically they’re all pretty much a dog’s dinner.
For me, that’s the main point about professionalism. It might be hard to define – but you sure as heck notice when it’s not there.
That hooks into what I see is the big, big difference between bloggers (even full-time bloggers) and journalists. (I can already tell that this isn’t going to make me very popular in some quarters.)
Editing crucial
I blog, I write for newspapers and magazines and I author books. I’ve also been an editor on books and magazines, a sub-editor, a proofreader – I work with words: that’s how I make a living to support my family. I’m a writer.
And I’m a better writer when I’m edited.
I love blogging: it’s a uniquely diverse medium. Being solely responsible for the stuff you publish is a real challenge. There are some great bloggers – and some rubbish journalists.
But still, only the latter are professionals. Why? Because they are being edited – that is, their creativity is reviewed before publication by people who work with words for a living. Editing has become unfashionable, and badly edited books and texts are everywhere – lots of people don’t even know what editing is – but it is absolutely crucial to the process of writing. Journalists are edited, bloggers are not. Bloggers (and readers of blogs) might see that as an advantage – and, in some cases, it is – but on the whole, in most instances, as a broad generalisation, editing makes journalists better writers than bloggers.
By ‘better’ I mean they use language in a more proficient way, say things more clearly, complete the job in a more pleasing way. It’s a quality issue. Most carpenters handle wood better than most plasterers. Most journalists handle words better than most bloggers (the ones I read, anyway).
Skills and motivation
There’s also a skill-set involved in journalism which bloggers don’t need. Researching, interviewing, extracting key details from a mass of information, developing sources, cross-checking. Knowing how to use these techniques (and why they are important) makes you a professional. Journalists are accountable for what they write in a way that bloggers simply aren’t. That doesn’t mean bloggers are ‘worse’ – indeed, they have a whole skill-set of their own that many journalists only vaguely understand – but it does mean that bloggers must gain new skills if they want to become journalists, and vice versa.
There’s another, linked point. Journalists make a living from what they write. Bloggers make a living because of what they write. There’s a big difference. If bloggers write stuff that is engaging, insightful, well conceived, well structured and intelligent, but that doesn’t bring traffic (and clicks), they make no money. By necessity, because of our desperately restrictive ad-centred online culture, bloggers must write stuff that is – in the broadest sense – popular. It can be crud in terms of content, style and/or purpose, but it must attract wide interest. (If it doesn’t, those bloggers make less money – or simply don’t attract followers.)
The only criterion for journalists, by contrast, is that their stuff must be well written. It doesn’t matter about the perception of popularity – because, in virtually all cases, the subject that the journalist is writing about has already been vetted and approved by experienced and (sorry) professional editors. And the beauty of a free press is that journalists can write stuff which might be unpopular, but which might still be important, and can have their material taken seriously by a diverse readership. They fail only if what they produce is badly written. Like I said before, professional quality is really difficult to define – but you know when it’s not there.
World of difference
There’s a world of difference between me making a soufflé, and a professional chef doing it. I can research the causes of the First World War and give a lecture to a hall full of students – but a professional academic would do it better. Leave me alone for long enough with your car and a Haynes manual, and I could probably fix that knocking noise in the back – but a professional mechanic would do it better (and more quickly).
It’s the same with writing. There’s plenty of room for blogging and journalism – but let’s not get the two mixed up.
A recent flurry of articles continues: after 48 Hours in Tel Aviv, something about the deserts of Abu Dhabi and the Traveller’s Guide to the Red Sea (all published in the Independent in the last month or so), my non-travel feature about gay and lesbian issues in Israel appeared in the Independent’s Saturday magazine over the weekend.
I had a great time researching this: everybody I spoke to, without exception, was open and willing to talk to me – a foreign, straight journalist – about their lives and the challenges (or lack of challenges) they face in everyday life. I loved it all. Seeing the Middle East through gay eyes was a revelation. And I’m absolutely thrilled to be off the travel pages and in the Indy’s Saturday mag.
The most difficult task came during the writing process. After roughly 7 days of research I had a mass of material – six or seven hours of interviews recorded on an iPod and an A6 notebook (160 pages) literally full to the last page. In a way, I’d done too much – but, then again, without all those discussions, I could only ever have skated over the surface of the issues. Every meeting and every conversation helped me to understand the situation better, and shape the article.
But, with only 2,500 words to play with, I had to leave several interviewees out of the final edit altogether; several others, despite long talks and – in one case – hours of sightseeing around the city together, ended up reduced to a couple of lines of backstory and a single quote. One interviewee has already emailed to say how disappointed they are in me (and in how ‘negative’ the article is); others have so far been universally positive and supportive.
The problem, I think, is that I went in with an open mind: the conception of the article changed several times – from the pitch, to when I first arrived, to when I left, to when I sat down to write. The final piece has a quite different tone from how I originally imagined it – due entirely to the people I spoke to on the ground. If I had fixed on an angle before arriving and stuck to it, I could have interviewed fewer people, for a shorter time, asked more targeted questions and come up with 2,500 words to suit that agenda.
But I preferred to see this project as a journey of discovery for me, too – I genuinely wanted to find out about LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) life in Israel… but perhaps that held me back and made the resulting article a little too quote-heavy. Not sure. It’s all a learning process. Might do things differently next time.
Then there was the Palestinian issue – lots to talk about there, in relation to gay issues, civil rights, the occupation… but, in truth, it’s a whole other article. I thought, early on, to bring in Palestinian perspectives, and I also had gay friends & contacts in neighbouring Arab countries ready to give quotes and insight – but, in the end, I decided that the subject of gay life in Israel merited discussion by itself. Expanding the boundaries of the subject would only have made the article fuzzier and less focused than it is. Tough decisions, these.
One thing that did jar was the images chosen by the picture editor to accompany the article. The Independent commissioned a Jerusalem-based freelance photographer, Ahikam Seri, to shoot the story – and he did an outstanding job, in interview situations, portraits and reportage. But the story ended up being illustrated with voyeuristic nightlife images on every page – men kissing, women kissing. I barely mention clubbing or Tel Aviv’s reputation for hedonism, but Ahikam’s portraits of the people I did write about, and his brilliant visual insights into ordinary gay life in the city, don’t get a look-in.
Instead, the newspaper thought: it’s a story about gays and lesbians – therefore, we must pack it with images of same-sex snogging, preferably in red-lit nightclub basements. Such a pity. Reinforces tired stereotypes, when there was an opportunity to undermine them. Opportunity lost.
As regular readers will know, I do a lot of work in Switzerland. I’m the author of the Rough Guide and have written dozens of articles over the years about travelling in Switzerland. I’ve got a soft spot for the place – but the Swiss need help. They’re afraid. The largest party in the Swiss parliament, the Swiss People’s Party (SVP), have exploited the politics of fear to call – and win – a referendum banning the construction of minarets. On a 53% turnout, 57.5% voted in favour.
The repulsive SVP, who’ve used what the Financial Times called “strident populism” to target ‘foreigners’ of all kinds in Switzerland as criminals, benefit cheats or worse, kicked off the campaign with the poster opposite: “Stop! Yes to the minaret ban”. Look at the imagery: minarets as missiles, women as menacing, the burqa as concealment, black as a threat, the Swiss flag cast into shadow from the east, the cross obliterated.
In response, this poster from the Swiss Inter-Faith Association has its head – literally – in the clouds. “The heavens over Switzerland are big enough”. Does this allay the fears sparked by the first poster. Not even close. Dreamy, drifty, irrelevant.
The fearmongers came back with another minaret as missile, this time punching straight through the heart of the Swiss cross (right).
The odious Federal Democratic Union chipped in with this crude depiction (left) of an out-of-scale minaret towering over medieval Swiss architecture – the politics of fear, again. Not appeals to the heart, or intellectual symbolism: plain “this is how it will be”. The tagline translates as “Everything’s fine without minarets”, or “Minarets aren’t necessary”.
So the Society of Minorities hit back hard with, er, this child’s game of “name the flag” (right). Colourful but utterly incoherent. “States where religious freedom is restricted” is the headline. “Don’t let it get this far,” they plead, placing Switzerland beside Saudi Arabia and Sudan. Aside from the questionable reasoning here – promote liberalism in your own country by condemning the lack of it elsewhere – who thought that this poster would mean ANYthing to ANYbody?
Whereas this – a big fat ugly minaret displacing the much-loved medieval Wasserturm tower in central Lucerne (left) – needs no words of explanation. Though, handily, the Lucerne racists have helpfully added “Stop Islamisation!” to ram their message home.
So liberal politicians decided the gloves were off, and produced, er, this (right). “Stop the madness”. More woolly-headed bleeding-heart begging, allied to more inexplicable graphic nonsense. As if showing religious architecture rubbed out like this means anything. Does this outrage, in the way the Lucerne image outrages? Or the minarets-as-missiles poster outrages? Not even close.
And this (left) – “Equal Rights for All” – just makes me angry. What the hell are they doing, coming up with incoherent, metaphorical rubbish like this?
And this (right) – “Religious freedom not culture war”. Very persuasive, I don’t think. Looks like something a student union would hand out.
Or this (left) – “Let’s vote no, for a fraternal Switzerland”. But why, for God’s sake? Tell me why should I vote no!
And finally, the crowning ignominy (right): the Green party in the Aargau region decided that if they couldn’t beat the racists, they’d join them. Deciding to mix the minaret vote with another referendum about defence procurement, they placed a minaret side by side with a missile, and served up two contradictory calls-to-action.
And Swiss liberals wonder why they lost the vote. A miserable failure to connect with the issue, address the fears stoked by the racist right or even design poster campaigns with an ounce of wit or visual pull. Liberal fail equals racist supremacy.
See the campaign posters here.
The Burj Dubai
Very interesting to see this teaser in ArabianBusiness.com for a forthcoming exclusive interview with British PR supremo Max Clifford. Dubai needs a “softer image”, apparently. The place is “obsessed with money and wealth” and – worse – it’s also expensive.
Well, hold the front page.
We’ve been here before. A hundred years ago, a certain other city was on the rise. Tired, poor and huddled masses were pouring in, sometimes seeking refuge, often seeking fortunes. The established powers looked at the city and snorted in contempt, dismissing it as brash, frenetic, soulless, money-grubbing. Technological advances, and less pressure on land space, meant that the upstart was able to construct the highest buildings in the world, frequently while in pursuit of power, prestige and some element of uniqueness.
Take a look at this, from a recent book about one of those buildings:
…a vulgar contraption for producing a profit… a dubious expression of corporate power, egregious advertising… an aggressive assault on [the city's] new signature skyline…
Sounds familiar. It was written about New York in the 1910s – but now we’re saying the same things about Dubai in the 2010s. I’ve lost count of the number of press articles – both travel stories and serious feature pieces – lambasting Dubai for its shallowness.
The Burj Dubai – the tallest building in the world (pictured) – is only what the Empire State Building once was.
The comparison doesn’t always fit – those huddled masses arriving at Ellis Island, for instance, were not denied citizenship, their culture marginalized by a ruling minority with entrenched powers based on ethnicity – but the attitudes of the outside world are strikingly similar.
Look at what New York became – then imagine what Dubai (and Abu Dhabi, and the rest) might become, if they could only match economic reform with political.
Cuddly old Max Clifford thinks Dubai needs a new image. This says more about him, and the priorities of PR, than it does about Dubai – or the real needs of this 21st-century NY-on-the-Gulf.
Every so often something comes along which knocks you sideways, out of your ordinary day and – even if only for a few minutes – into a place of wonder. I don’t intend this blog to be a regurgitation of stuff I happened to come across online, but today I’m making an exception.
The image on the right – of the famous Burj Al-Arab “seven-star” hotel in Dubai – was taken by French photographer Martin Becka, using a 150-year-old camera, with techniques of developing and printing that date from the earliest days of photography. I’m not a specialist, and I don’t understand the processes – but the images speak for themselves. They are ethereal, exceptional – pushing our familiar 21st-century world back into not just the appearance of the 19th-century but, somehow, its mindset too. I look at these buildings and structures in the same way that I look at grainy, 19th-century images of people and places – as museum-pieces, detached from my life – but then I can also simultaneously hold the knowledge of Dubai’s colour, clarity and life in my head, because I’ve seen it! Being presented with such carefully mannered “old” depictions of buildings and places I have seen with my own eyes – and also touched, heard, smelled and felt – asks fascinating questions about how I interpret images of places I have NOT seen, as well as about what photography does to the people and places it depicts.
Becka’s images, somehow, show as much of the behind-the-lens world of the photographer as they do of the front-of-lens world of Dubai.
They are like painting, depicting a complete reality with far greater insight than the sharpest, clearest modern photograph.
I’ll never look at a musty, fuzzy old 19th-century photo in the same way again!
I’ll stop there. For more, see this news story on CNN, this website of Becka’s images – and google for plenty more.
UPDATE 5th November – I should have put this 3rd image (of the Dubai metro under construction) into the original post. Now, especially after Helena’s comment today mentioning Metropolis, it simply has to go in. Enjoy…
Which is the most ethnically diverse city in the Middle East? Go on, have a think. What’s your best guess? Dubai?
My guess might surprise you. If you discount Mecca during the haj – which hosts 3 million people from seemingly every country in the world – I’d say the answer is Tel Aviv. I just got back from there, on assignment for The Independent, and was delighted to get reacquainted with what is an amazingly diverse city.
In the space of a few days, and aside from Israelis, I talked to Afghans, Iranians, Palestinians, Egyptians, Iraqis, Romanians, Americans, Ethiopians, French, Brazilians, South Africans, Moroccans, British, and more – most of them Israeli by nationality but carrying cultural identities originating all over the world.
There are, of course, very specific political and cultural reasons for Tel Aviv’s diversity – before and after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 people were encouraged to go there to make a new life, in the process erasing several pre-existing communities. For some observers, that turns the city into an illegitimate implant. For me, it turns it into a living reflection of the region’s human tragedies – a precious, uniquely valuable record of the results of intolerance.
The injustices are not clear-cut. The thinking among politicians and ordinary people, both in Israel and in other countries, which resulted in whole communities arriving en masse in Tel Aviv strikes me as being just as racist as the thinking which has legitimized the complete emasculation by Israel of Old Jaffa. This once-thriving Palestinian city, dating back to the Old Testament, is now shockingly reduced to a touristy stop on a sightseeing tour, hosting only galleries run by wealthy Israeli artists and a handful of underplayed (or, in the case of the Jaffa museum, neglected) historical attractions.
Seafront districts of Jaffa are now full of luxury villas and condos, designed in a pastiche style more reminiscent of contemporary architecture in the Gulf – pointed arches splashed around in a vain attempt to locate the building within some kind of cultural context. Tel Aviv has much beauty, but it has made Jaffa ugly – literally and metaphorically.
Jaffa is a mostly overlooked link to further themes of exile and displacement. In 1948 many people from there were forced to flee to the Jordanian capital, Amman – barely 100km to the east.
Like Tel Aviv, Amman’s character has been shaped by movements of people. Once a mainly bedouin city, its population doubled in the space of a few weeks in 1948 as Palestinians arrived in large numbers seeking refuge from war and persecution in Israel. The same thing happened in 1967 – and again in 1991, as hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled from Kuwait. After the 2003 Gulf War, hundreds of thousands more people arrived in Amman from Iraq. The city, poor to begin with, and buffeted by waves of refugees, has often struggled to cope.
Amman has remained overwhelmingly Muslim and ethnically homogeneous. Yet Tel Aviv – which has remained overwhelmingly Jewish – has become ethnically very diverse.
This isn’t the place to bang on about cultural identity, but one thing is interesting to note. Tel Aviv has frequently been active in facilitating the absorption of large numbers of immigrants (aided, of course, by political engagement and lots of money). Amman, by contrast, has been almost entirely passive: urban planning is a recent innovation and a sense of shared endeavour has been almost completely lacking. As a consequence Amman sprawls, while Tel Aviv flows.
Yet both were founded in 1909. Both have been celebrating their centenary this year with cultural events and public parties – a parade in Amman, fireworks in Tel Aviv – and dedicated websites (this for Amman, this for Tel Aviv). Both cities identify strongly with their populations’ experience of transplant and exile: in both, a simple “Where are you from?” is enough to cue a life-story. They have a lot to share.
But there has been no contact. I know only a handful of people in both cities who have made the journey to visit their urban neighbours. Isn’t that a pity?
Yamaan Safady
Back in June I blogged about how a tour-guide friend from Jordan, Yamaan Safady, had been shortlisted for a major award – the Paul Morrison Guide Awards 2009, run by Wanderlust magazine in the UK.
I was at the awards ceremony last night, at London’s Royal Geographical Society, and I can report that Yamaan took the Silver Award – a landmark achievement that confirms him as the top guide in Jordan, and one of the best in the world. Hearty congratulations to him, to Tejendra Singh, who took the Bronze Award, and to Diego Torres, who took Gold.
Yamaan also got the biggest laugh of the night. All three guides were asked by Wanderlust editor Dan Linstead to say what their clients most often wanted to know during a trip. The others said that guests asked how long they had been guiding, or which was their favourite destination. Yamaan just said “Are you married?” Brilliant.
I wish him every success. He says he wants to use his £2500 prize to qualify as an International Mountain Leader, which would make him the first Jordanian to do so and enable him to represent his country abroad. “This will allow me to lead hiking groups all over the world and promote my beautiful country – a dream come true!”
Good for you, Yamaan.
A little while ago, I noticed a timely opportunity to write about a city I know well (let’s call it Destination X). I pitched a few ideas to a National Newspaper Travel Editor contact (let’s call him NNTE 1). He accepted one. He also put me onto a colleague of his in the Features section of the same newspaper, who accepted another. Woohoo – two commissions to write about Destination X.
I approached the relevant tourist board and requested a return flight to Destination X plus hotel accommodation for me to do my research. They got the ball rolling. All totally standard practice – nothing out of the ordinary yet.
As freelancers will know, though, two commissions are rarely enough to make a living. So I pitched another idea from Destination X to a different National Newspaper Travel Editor (NNTE 2), who is responsible for that newspaper’s online travel content. He liked it, but said there was no budget to pay me for it.
Modest proposal
So I suggested an alternative. Instead of having the newspaper pay me to write about Destination X, how about if I asked the tourist board to pay me instead? It wouldn’t be ‘advertorial’ – where a travel article (or whole section) is sponsored by a tourist board or travel company who dictate what gets written. All my research and writing would be done alone as normal and I would file directly to the editor – but the tourist board would foot the bill for my time and, erhmm, expertise. Result: the paper gets great content from which it can generate revenue, I get paid and Destination X gets coverage – all happy, right?
Nope. My modest proposal was rejected out of hand. NNTE 2 saw it as tying him to the tourist board. It was a ‘no’ on principle.
So I took yet another pitch about Destination X to a different National Newspaper Travel Editor. NNTE 3 liked the idea and was happy to run it – it tied in nicely with a similarly themed article from the same region that was already in his schedules – but again had no budget to pay me. I suggested the alternative payment method, but again it was refused on principle.
Principles
I wonder, though, what principle is at stake. Newspapers have no (or very little) money to pay for travel articles. NNTE 3 told me he now runs only one freelance piece a week, if that. Other newspapers commission nothing from freelancers at all anymore, running only “What I Did On My Holidays” articles written by celebs, staffers from other sections of the same newspaper and authors with a book to plug. Almost all seem to lament losing the insight, the expertise and the sheer variety of freelance content – but their hands are tied.
Yet I think both NNTEs I approached thought my payment idea risked undermining their credibility. I wonder, with respect all round, how much of that is left. Opening one recent national newspaper travel section, you got a welcome message from the boss of a tourist board followed by a dozen articles praising his region – including the likes of How Great It Is To Walk In The [X] Hills footed by a paragraph mentioning that [X] Railways serves all the destinations mentioned in the article, and underlined by a chunky banner advert for, oh, [X] Railways.
I’m not questioning any individual journalist’s integrity – or the necessity for that newspaper to seek funding through sponsorship – but I wonder how much credibility the public gives to such material. It was, effectively, a brochure in newspaper form. Handy for a spare weekend, but Woodward & Bernstein it ain’t.
Editorial independence
The key point of principle rests on the newspapers’ reputation for editorial independence. That, traditionally, has depended on their ability to fund their businesses through interspersing editorial with advertising. That model is now under severe threat.
How to pay the piper?
So far so bad. Yet with travel advertorial, the tail has begun wagging the dog. Companies with a vested interest are starting to be able to dictate terms. With the ongoing financial reshaping of the industry, editorial independence is dangerously threatened.
Putting an end to advertorial – by disconnecting the right of the journalist to get paid from the payer’s being able to control what is written – seems to me to be an innovative and effective route back to integrity and independence.
NNTE 2 queried what would happen if he didn’t like the piece I wrote and chose not to run it. Perhaps he thought he’d be in hock to the person paying my fee. But he – as now – would have no contact, and certainly no relationship, with the tourist board or travel firm paying me. If the story isn’t good enough to run, I simply wouldn’t get paid – but I would then be free to take it elsewhere. Since it would have no price-tag attached, the chances of one or other newspaper/magazine somewhere in the world picking it up for publication would be much higher than at present, where a ‘killed’ story is effectively dead in the water. I would then go back to my fee-payer and renegotiate.
Would a tourist board with extra-deep pockets be able to dictate to a writer what they should write about? Anything’s possible – but any journalist worth their salt would know when they’re being fed a line and would reject it for the sake of their own reputation, and (more to the point) any editor worth theirs would be able to detect a whitewash instantly. Tourist boards and travel firms already heavily subsidise the writing of most travel journalism, with literally thousands spent behind the scenes on a single article for air tickets, hotels, tours, guides and activities. Does it matter where the final, relatively insignificant cash fee to the journalist comes from?
In an industry unable to pay its suppliers, securing outside funding while safeguarding quality could actually put everybody on their toes and, in effect, raise standards. Suddenly, travel journalists would be motivated to double-check their sources. Reputations would be at stake.
Into the abyss
(Credit: myopera.com)
Travel journalism is staring into the abyss. The economics of the industry don’t really work, and haven’t done since newspapers started to rely on travel firms to facilitate creation of content instead of paying to send their own travel journalists abroad. With a shrinking world having reduced the experiential gap between writer and reader to almost nothing, travel journalists – unfairly – have a reputation as just another breed of fat-cats, swanning about being showered with freebies by travel companies and airlines in return for writing more or less bland holiday reports. The quid-pro-quo editorial models currently in place – airline gives journo ticket; journo namechecks airline in return – perpetuate that myth. Overtly sponsored advertorial doesn’t help.
Since newspapers are increasingly unable to pay for professionally produced, independent travel content, I thought my modest proposal to have someone else cough up might work. Clearly, I was wrong. But some alternative system has to be invented soon. I’m old-fashioned enough to think that people still appreciate well-written, insightful, long-form travel journalism – writing that is closer in spirit to the foreign pages than the lifestyle supplement. If I’m right, but the newspapers won’t pay for it, who will?
Footnote
No sour grapes, by the way. I think NNTE 2 and 3 have missed an opportunity, but that’s OK; I can appreciate that now is perhaps not the time to be testing new models on an ad-hoc basis. I’m talking to both of them about other ideas. Meanwhile, anyone thinking of trying to start out in travel journalism should be aware that I also spoke to NNTE 4 (no freelance budget; staffers only), NNTE 5 (Destination X is too far down our wishlist), NNTE 6 (no freelance budget)… It’s a jungle out there. NNTE 1 has my full attention.
The receding Dead Sea
Ferociously busy at the moment, ahead of a trip next week – I’ve got several stories I want to blog about, but only time now to post this BBC news report from Jordan by Natalia Antelava about the plans to build a Red-Dead Canal, linking the Red Sea to the Dead Sea, and thus (a) providing desalinated water for drinking, (b) exploiting the altitude difference to create hydroelectric power, and (c) pumping super-concentrated brine into the Dead Sea in an attempt to halt the shrinkage.
TV, as always, is restricted by the necessity to provide pictures – even when there’s nothing really to look at – but at least this 3-minute package introduces the issues and talks to the right people, including Munqeth Mehyar, director of Friends of the Earth Middle East (FOEME) in Jordan…
Red-Dead merits a longer post; I will come back to it.
Expect a price war on flights to the Middle East this winter. On 2nd November, easyJet launches a new route from Luton to Tel Aviv, joining a host of airlines including BA, bmi, El Al, Thomson and jet2 flying between the UK and Israel.
More significantly, the highly successful UAE-based low-cost carrier Air Arabia has announced that by the end of 2009 it will be launching a new airline, Air Arabia Egypt, to link several Egyptian airports with destinations in the Gulf, North Africa, Europe and the UK.
The Israel example shows the power of what the airline industry calls VFR – ‘visiting friends and relatives’. Despite the political problems, tourism to Israel has always remained buoyant, fed by special-interest religious tours in particular – but fuelled above all by VFR, especially from areas with a high Jewish population. In the UK that means, firstly, north London: even before easyJet’s launch, El Al is the only full-service national flag carrier able to maintain regular near-daily scheduled service out of Luton (and, previously, out of Stansted), in addition to its twice-daily Heathrow service. Another key VFR origin is Manchester, from where jet2 launched nonstop Tel Aviv flights in January 2009 – shortly afterwards announcing that it was doubling its peak service.
VFR out of the UK to most other Middle Eastern destinations isn’t as strong – there just aren’t that many expat Jordanians and Syrians in Britain. Air Arabia, though, has already proved that VFR works: in April 2009 it launched Air Arabia Maroc, a low-cost carrier which today links Casablanca with a clutch of francophone cities in western Europe (alongside London, Milan and elsewhere).
Its new venture, Air Arabia Egypt, on the other hand, is squarely targeting the leisure market, with multiple bases in Egypt serving different markets: Cairo and Alexandria will no doubt benefit from expanded links to Africa and the Gulf (where the large numbers of Egyptian expats brings VFR into play again), while Luxor, Sharm El-Sheikh and Hurghada will likely attract service chiefly from northern and western Europe. The three Air Arabias will also, no doubt, link up, making it possible to fly in a series of hops from the Atlantic to the Bay of Bengal, low-cost all the way.
Ryanair CEO Michael O'Leary
The new venture also kick-starts a fascinating contest. easyJet, a pioneer of low-cost travel in Europe, already serves Egyptian holiday airports such as Sharm and Hurghada from the UK. It will, it seems, soon have to compete with Air Arabia, a pioneer of low-cost travel in the Middle East. Two highly successful carriers from different parts of the globe are about to meet head-to-head. Be sure that Ryanair will be watching closely.
Beside all of this, the Gulf (although aided by market protection) is able to support six more low-cost carriers – Sama, Nas, Felix, Bahrain Air, FlyDubai and Jazeera. The last of these has announced that it is searching for a new regional hub. Will it be Beirut? Istanbul? Perhaps Athens?
As Middle East airlines start reaching out towards Europe, expect an ever-intensifying clash of low-cost cultures in the months ahead.
Chuffed and delighted to have been invited to appear as a studio guest on this week’s Excess Baggage, the Saturday-morning travel show on BBC radio’s speech network Radio 4 – recorded, thankfully, instead of going out live, as it usually does. All rather nerve-wracking, but I was on to talk about the plans for rail in the Middle East – which I’ve blogged about before and am familiar enough with to blather about at length – so having less than 48 hours’ notice wasn’t as much of an issue as it might have been.
The whole thing actually went very smoothly – ushered into the studio, a little preamble, polystyrene tea provided, and we just launched into it. Whether I made any sense or not is a different matter – judge by clicking here to go to the programme page, where there is a Listen button (and then please tell me what you think by coming back here and leaving a comment).
If you just want my bit, fast forward to about 18′50″ into the show – but I was on with FT journalist Michael Peel, who was plugging his book A Swamp Full of Dollars, about oil and corruption in Nigeria, and writer Jo Tatchell, who was plugging her book A Diamond in the Desert, a portrait of Abu Dhabi – both with fascinating stories to tell. It’s well worth listening to the whole half-hour.
A great experience, which I enjoyed very much. Presenter Sandi Toksvig was the height of charm, claiming extreme tiredness as the excuse for fluffing her script several times (smoothed over in the final edit), and ending the show – once we got there safely – with a juicy obscenity. Wonderful. I love radio. Am trying to do more of it.
I blogged in detail here about Episode One of the BBC’s travelogue The Frankincense Trail, where Kate Humble travels across the Middle East. Episode Two was, I thought, much better – an absorbing (and probably unique) hour of prime-time terrestrial TV devoted to showcasing Saudi Arabia as a tourist destination. There was, fortunately, much less fooling around on camels and much more intelligent insight into previously unseen or unknown aspects of Saudi and Arab society. A few mistakes here and there – notably calling anything smoky and/or fragrant ‘frankincense’, even though it was more often oud or bakhoor – but otherwise excellent. It’s about time a city as beautiful and atmospheric as Jeddah got more attention from the mainstream travel media.
Since a lot of people are asking how to follow in Kate’s footsteps, here is some information to help travellers. I’m not connected with Kate or the BBC – just an enthusiastic travel journalist.
Dhofar, Oman
Oman
Kate started her journey in Dhofar, the southernmost region of Oman. Salalah, the Dhofari capital, is roughly 1000km south of Muscat. Several airlines fly there: from the UK, the easiest will be Oman Air from Heathrow via Muscat, or you could get a cheap flight to either Istanbul or Hurghada (Egypt) from where Jazeera Airways flies to Salalah via Kuwait. There’s a great museum of frankincense in Salalah (which also has a fantastic souk where you can buy your own), and you could follow cultural itineraries – designated World Heritage by UNESCO – to the frankincense groves in Wadi Dawkah near Salalah, as well as the ancient trading cities of Sumharam (aka Khor Rori) and Ubar. Read this superb article in Saudi Aramco World by Tim Mackintosh-Smith. The Oman tourist board is here.
Yemen
Yemen is not an easy country to visit as an independent Western traveller. Its politics are unstable, its infrastructure is very poor and safety is sometimes uncertain, especially when travelling outside the centre of the capital, Sanaa. Lots of tourists visit, travel and have a great time without any problems; others run into serious difficulties. Kate went to Shibam, in the hard-to-access Hadhramaut region of eastern Yemen, then detoured to Aden, once a British crown colony (where she was taken to see a statue of Queen Victoria), and on to Sanaa. Travelling overland from Oman is difficult: regulations surrounding the land crossing change frequently. The Yemen tourist board is here, and this is a good article from The Independent by travel journalist Ginny Hill.
Saudi Arabia
The difficulty with visiting Saudi Arabia is getting a visa to enter; once you’re in, travelling around is straightforward for men (women must be accompanied by a man, either a close relative or a licensed guide). Muslims qualify for pilgrimage visas. If you’re not Muslim, but you have business contacts inside Saudi, they could sponsor a visa for you. 3- or 5-day transit visas are sometimes issued, under certain conditions. Otherwise, tourist visas are restricted in number, difficult to get and very expensive.
Kingdom Centre, Riyadh
Two UK tour companies offer Saudi Arabia. The Traveller operates cultural tours which visit key destinations such as Riyadh (where Kate discussed capital punishment with a chief of the religious police), Jeddah (where Kate was moved to tears by the call to prayer) and Madain Saleh, an ancient Nabatean trading city in the northern deserts. Regaldive operates trips to the Farasan Islands in the Red Sea hosted by Eric Mason of DreamDiver.net: Eric led Kate on a wreck dive somewhere in the area around the Farasan (and has featured in travel articles such as this one by James Montague in The Observer). You could also talk directly to Sadd Al-Samallaghi Tours of Jeddah, one of Saudi’s leading ‘inbound’ tour operators: they handle regular tour groups from lots of European countries and were credited as ‘fixers’ for Kate Humble’s trip.
The Saudi capital Riyadh’s commercial area Olaya is dominated by two skyscrapers – the Faisaliah Centre and the Kingdom Centre (also known as the Potato Peeler, or the Vest – see pic – which was where Kate met Prince Alwaleed). Kate also met and flew with ex-fighter pilot Prince Sultan (who happens to be director of the Saudi tourism authority) and Prince Bandar bin Saud, head of the wildlife commission: she was flown in a light aircraft over the desert to the Uruq Bani Maarid nature reserve and on to the ancient frankincense trading centre of Al-Ukhdood near the modern Saudi city of Najran, site of a 6th-century massacre of Christians. She went to Jeddah, exploring the Old City, and the beautiful ancient city of Madain Saleh (built by the Nabateans, who also built Petra, nearby in Jordan) and dived in the Farasan Islands.
Click here and scroll down to post no.36 for a detailed account of how an ordinary traveller secured a transit visa to Saudi in 2006 and spent four days touring independently. Here is a travel article about visiting Saudi by Mark Stratton in CNN Traveller – and here is another, by Cath Urquhart in Wanderlust.
But the best way to get into the frankincense mood is to read Petra and the Lost Kingdom of the Nabataeans by historian Jane Taylor. I’m reliably informed Jane pops up in Episode Four, to guide Kate around Petra in Jordan (along with Marguerite van Geldermalsen, author of the highly recommended Married To A Bedouin). Jane’s book is full of stunning photos and intimate historical detail about the ancient frankincense trade. (Disclosure: Jane is a friend of mine, and has collaborated on my Rough Guide to Jordan.)
After a generation of inaction – and increasingly bad traffic congestion – the six GCC countries (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE) have finally started to build decent public transport systems. Dubai’s metro opens in a few days’ time. Abu Dhabi’s metro is expected within five years, alongside an urban tram network. But the most exciting plans surround construction of an international rail network across the Arabian Peninsula and the whole Middle East.
A mammoth undertaking
It’s a mammoth undertaking. Although the terrain – and the long distances – suit train travel perfectly, there are only a few scattered lines currently in operation.
Saudi Arabia runs a passenger service between Dammam and Riyadh. Syria has a good network, which links – through the tenuous connection of the Toros Express – to Turkey. Israel also has a decent system, but for political reasons it is completely isolated from its neighbours: trains once ran from Cairo all the way along the eastern Mediterranean coast to Beirut, but the lines were cut in 1948.
Flying the Arab Revolt flag
And the old Hejaz Railway, built by the Ottomans to take haj pilgrims from Damascus to Mecca, blown up by Faisal and Lawrence of Arabia during the ‘Arab Revolt’ – and which, in its latter years, hosted passengers trains between Damascus and Amman in Jordan – is also no more. Jordan resurrected it as a novelty this month, running ‘Ramadan Specials’ between Amman and the nearby city of Zarqa, but hardly anybody took notice. As this article pointed out, Jordan has no culture of rail.
Big plans
Yet big plans are afoot. Jordan is planning a new national network, incorporating a commuter light-rail line between Amman and Zarqa along the route of the old Hejaz track. The intention is to link up with Syrian railways, and idealists envision that – once there is sufficient political will – Jordan might also link up with the Israeli network. Relaxing one day aboard the Galilee Flyer from Haifa to Irbid, or the Umayyad Express from Damascus to Jerusalem? We can only hope.
But the biggest plans are on the Arabian Peninsula. Saudi Arabia’s rail expansion includes a Landbridge project to extend the Dammam-Riyadh line as far as Jeddah, thus linking the Gulf with the Red Sea for the first time. The Haramain high-speed rail line from Jeddah to the Holy Cities of Medina and Mecca will be partly ready for next year’s haj, and a driverless monorail is planned within Mecca to ease the traffic problems caused by 3 million pilgrims a year. The intention is for the Saudi network – specifically a new north-south line running from Riyadh to Ha’il – to continue to the Jordanian border, forming a connection with Jordan’s domestic railways.
Then the six GCC countries are well advanced on plans for an international railway along the Gulf coast from Kuwait to Oman, which would link to domestic rail networks planned throughout this region. The Friendship Causeway, a massive engineering project to build a road link across 40km of sea between Bahrain and Qatar – thus reducing the journey time between Doha and Manama from almost 5 hours to 30 minutes, when it opens in 2015 – was hastily redesigned at the last minute to include space for a rail line. Both countries are designing railways and urban metros within their own, small territories.
And the UAE is planning a national railway, linking Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ras Al Khaimah and crossing to the east coast to Fujairah. In addition, a triangle of high-speed lines will connect Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Al Ain. Lines will extend into Oman to the capital, Muscat.
Finally, the GCC line would join with the Saudi network, by then itself linked with Jordan, Syria and Turkey. Syria and Iraq are already connected. Trains could, in theory, run the whole distance from Istanbul to Muscat, across half a dozen countries or more, making the prospect of travelling by train from Europe to the Gulf a real possibility.
Social cohesion
The potential for change is very exciting. Railways – or, more specifically, opportunities to travel easily and cheaply – make healthy societies: they foster social cohesion. Railways are progress. British policymakers forgot this in the 1960s and 1970s, cut lines and denied the railways decent investment. This contributed to the isolating, individualistic, London-centric reshaping of society which continued through the 1980s and which we are still grappling with today.
Mecca monorail?
In the UAE, where 80% of the population are from elsewhere, Emiratis are very unlikely to use their new mass transit systems – at least for another generation, until the individualism (and subsidised petrol) which ties people to their cars is abandoned. Consequently, building railways seems to me to be a rare, tacit acknowledgement by the UAE governments of the contribution made by outsiders, in particular by South Asian expats. It is – momentously, for these fragmented societies – a step towards integration.
Rail buffs in the West may get misty-eyed about all this, dreaming of historic lines converted for a new age, trains as harbingers of peace, new networks in virgin territory – and, of course, the romance of all those ancient cities of Arabia linked by gleaming new high-speed expresses.
But for the people in the region, the plans for rail are far more meaningful than that. Never mind all those skyscrapers and multibillion-dollar megaprojects; railway construction represents the most tangible, realistic move towards nation-building yet seen in the region. For the first time, virtually unlimited public funds are being married with level-headed, long-term planning policies. Two generations on from the biggest lottery win in history – the discovery of oil – the Gulf countries are starting to find their feet again.
Railways really matter.
UPDATE 7/9/09: A specialist rail writer friend advises me that the Hejaz line was in fact built by the Germans, under Ottoman direction, and also points out that it might be misleading to compare Syria’s network with Israel’s; the latter is far more advanced. Also check out this great video (5mins), posted today, of a journey aboard one of the ‘Ramadan Special’ train services along the old Hejaz line in Jordan – atmospheric visuals, “slumdog” scenery, but no toilet paper! Commentary is in Arabic, but the footage and music speak for themselves.
So I’d unexpectedly been upgraded to business class on my return flight into Heathrow Terminal 3 a couple of weeks ago, and during the flight the steward had handed me a card authorising access to the ‘Fast Track’ channel at passport control. Great, I thought.
On arrival, the immigration area was jampacked and heaving with people: later, I counted 18 flights on the screens at baggage reclaim as having arrived in quick succession at Terminal 3, almost all of them long-haul (Singapore, Delhi, Muscat, Bangkok, Dubai, etc). Even the queue for EU passport-holders stretched out of the door. I sidled over to the Fast Track lane, showed my card, and joined the shortish queue.
25 minutes later I was still standing in line. Meanwhile, the entire queue of non-Fast Tracked EU passport-holders had been processed, and the hall was three-quarters empty.
You see, this was not Fast Track for EU passport-holders. Anybody and everybody who’d flown business class on the previous 18 flights was in that queue. So the two officials posted to Fast Track were having to do complete security checks on some people, with detailed questioning and referrals, before they could issue visas, as happens at the ‘Other Nationalities’ zone. Except that Other Nationalities has about 10 or 15 desks staffed, whereas Fast Track has only two.
I don’t even know who to blame: is it BAA’s fault, or the UK Border Agency, or the airlines?
Fast Track at a British airport is a relatively simple concept to grasp: obviously, it should be for EU passport-holders only. Whoever is to blame, next time I’m opting for the ordinary line.
I settled in last night to watch the BBC’s new travel series The Frankincense Trail, in which presenter Kate Humble lugs a sack of frankincense fresh from the tree in Dhofar, southern Oman, all the way along the ancient trade routes across Arabia to the Mediterranean port of Gaza (or tries to).
I had high hopes: it’s a nice idea, and Humble is a good choice. There were some great sequences – camel-jumping in Yemen (where young bloods try to leap over a row of dromedaries, Evel Knievel-style: see pic), a bit of imperial nostalgia in Aden, discussing capital punishment with the chief of the religious police in Riyadh’s “Chop-Chop Square”, and so on.
But what a wasted opportunity in Oman! As the source of frankincense, and the anchor of the whole trip, Oman was treated surprisingly shoddily – a scant five or ten minutes, focused entirely around Kate Humble fooling around on camelback like a package tourist at the Pyramids. Nothing of Dhofari culture, nothing of the amazing frankincense souk in Salalah, nothing of the extraordinarily evocative ruins of Sumharam at Khor Rori, nothing of Salalah’s state-of-the-art Museum of the Frankincense Lands… Oman was reduced to swarthy tribesmen dancing and shouting at camels a lot while blonde foreigner looks on in bemused hilarity. If I was part of the Omani team who fixed that particular shoot, or in the promotions unit of the Omani Ministry of Tourism, I would not be very happy today…
Then we got perhaps the most positive half-hour of prime-time TV coverage Yemen has had in years – genuinely interesting sequences of travel, well described, well shot and with good Q&A cultural insight between Humble and her Yemeni fixer – including a baby-blessing ceremony in a tower-house in Shibam, a wadi walk approaching Shabwa on the ancient frankincense route, some nice sequences in Sanaa, and more.
Because the Yemeni-Saudi border is closed, Kate then diverted onto a three-hour flight to Riyadh to continue the story. But why Riyadh? It has nothing to do with frankincense, and is miles off the route. Why not Jeddah – which is at least in the right direction – or, better still, a connecting flight back to Najran or Jizan, on the Saudi side of the border, to pick up the proper trail again?
My guess – and forgive my cynicism here (I’m not normally a conspiracy theorist) –is because this series came about not because of a desire to enlighten the world about frankincense – but, rather, because someone, somewhere, gained permission to film a travel documentary inside Saudi Arabia, perhaps after years of asking. Lots is changing inside KSA, and there is a strong desire there to gain screentime in the West that is both positive and focused well away from news. From the trailers, it looks like episode two sees Kate hosted by Prince Alwaleed bin Talal for a high-life tour of Saudi in limos, supercars, private jets etc etc. So much for frankincense. I suspect that, having secured permission to film, the successful negotiator went away and developed a pitch which justified screening an hour of amazing scenery and memorable adventures inside KSA without it looking like a PR whitewash. Weaving KSA into a story about ancient trade routes is a brainwave. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen Saudi promoted onscreen as a viable tourism destination.
It might work well: we’ve only had the first 15 minutes so far, at the end of episode one (of four) – though arrival in Riyadh was tragically, and brainlessly, heralded with the immortal voiceover from Kate Humble: “Saudi Arabia is a kingdom of contrasts”. Doh! Fire the scriptwriter!
And then, after dwelling on just how scarily different Kate thinks Saudi will be, with her tears flowing after trying on niqab in Sanaa (yes, it made her cry) and her nervousness about doing something wrong in Riyadh, when she finally arrived and was taken to a mall, all she could say – while looking around at Dunkin Donuts and shops selling, yes, skirts and T-shirts – was “It’s all so depressingly familiar”. Doh again! That felt like a microcosm of how Europeans have approached Arabia for generations: first it’s all thrillingly exotic, then the exoticism starts to feel threatening, then finally it’s not exotic enough. It’s the same mindset which results in Dubai tour operators laying on Ukrainian hoofers to stage a pastiche of Egyptian bellydance for groups on desert safaris – the reality is simply not enough to meet expectations.
But praise to the BBC for commissioning a four-part series about travelling across the Arabian Peninsula – that must be a first. Interesting that it was scheduled in the middle of Ramadan, as well.
However, this is the map the BBC have drawn to illustrate the route. That diamond at the top is the ancient port of Gaza – but, as I’m sure must be known to BBC TV executives, Gaza is not an Israeli city. A simple question: where on this map is Palestine?
UPDATE: Seems I might be wrong about that Saudi prince – possibly not Prince Alwaleed, but rather Prince Bandar. And the Daily Telegraph have pulled no punches in their review of this programme today…
UPDATE 2: For detailed travel notes about following in Kate’s footsteps, click here.
Something’s been bugging me about Qatar Airways.
If you’ve ever watched any of the global English-language rolling news channels – chiefly CNN International, BBC World News or Sky News (all of which keep me company in hotel rooms around the world) – you couldn’t fail to have seen an ad or a sponsor’s message from Qatar Airways, generally playing on how luxurious their onboard service is. They’ve cornered the market in sponsoring the Sky and BBC weather forecasts, which are now topped and tailed with cute little five-second Qatar Airways clips talking about how “Tonight, we expect to see inky clouds of real Arabica coffee brewing over the Middle East” (or whatever).
All their ads end with this grotesquely offensive close-up of a female steward’s right eye, as she beams in delight and her pupil dilates with the sheer sexual thrill of anticipating being able to serve you real Arabica coffee.
That image comes directly from the Qatar Airways website. If you look closely, the tagline reads “The world’s 5-star airline”. But if you play the clip, the voiceover (and the closing image) read “World’s 5-star airline.” They’ve dropped the “The”.
The same thing is repeated throughout this page, which announced the campaign. All the original poster ads say “The” – but now, none of them does. The TV campaign features the same voiceover as when it launched, but now spoken by a different actor: at some point late last year they withdrew the original ads that used “The” and re-recorded them. Why? I don’t know.
Did someone sue them for making false claims? Is a statement such as “The world’s 5-star airline” actionable? I have no idea. But if you think about it, “World’s five-star airline” (which is now the default tagline for the global campaign) is meaningless. There is no such place as “World”. Once you notice it, the ads studiously avoid saying “The world”.
I wonder why.
And is it only me who’s noticed?
Image: Cessna152 travelblog.org
I recently came across this article, where the editor of Dubai-based HotelierMiddleEast.com bemoans the practice of bartering (aka bargaining or haggling).
He’s making a serious point, about the madness of hotels’ imposing absurdly inflated “rack rates” on walk-in customers while offering cut-price “corporate rates” to agents, but I’m more interested in why one of the main bugbears for Westerners visiting the Middle East is the lack of clear pricing – on everything from hotel rooms to market vegetables.
In the West we’ve got used to sticker prices – a single figure which rolls in all the costs of production, distribution, business overheads, profits – everything, into one final, unshakeable, legally enforceable price.
Just about everywhere else, prices are open to negotiation. Regular customers get discounts; newcomers (or foreigners) can expect to pay more. Buying and selling – especially in the Arab world – is a sociable process, where human interaction (chatting about family, drinking tea) often matters at least as much as economics. Prices are fluid; instead, each side weighs up value. How much does the buyer value the item? How much does the seller value getting that item off his hands?
All this leaves a lot of visitors floundering.
Or that’s my impression. I’d be interested to hear other opinions – do you hate haggling? If so, why? Isn’t it all just part of the experience of another culture? Perhaps you’ve tried haggling and got it horribly wrong? Or maybe some brave souls have tried to haggle at home – any success? Was the effort worth it? All stories welcome!
Just wanted to acknowledge the fact – a few weeks late, sorry – that BBC journalist Aleem Maqbool won the Gaby Rado Memorial Award at the 2009 Amnesty International Media Awards last month, for his reporting from Gaza after taking over the BBC’s bureau there following Alan Johnston’s kidnap. I was going to link to an interesting article by him in the current Amnesty magazine, talking about his career and experiences – but it’s not available online because Amnesty doesn’t appear to have updated its magazine pages since 2006… (why?)
Never mind. Politics aside, one of Aleem’s most memorable stories – apart from his blog from the haj – came from his idea last year to walk from Nazareth to Bethlehem, retracing the journey made by Joseph and Mary in the Christmas story, arriving in Bethlehem on Christmas Day. If you haven’t read his blog and watched the video clips from along the way, take time to do so – it’s a great travel story, told brilliantly well.
Yesterday, twenty Arabian oryx – a kind of white antelope, native to the Middle East – were released into the wild at Wadi Rum in Jordan, as the latest step in efforts to reintroduce the animal to the wild after its near-extinction in the 1970s.
A bit of background: oryx once roamed widely from Egypt to Syria to Oman. They were a prize target for hunters, who celebrated the chase in epic poems: oryx became symbols of grace and fortitude, mythologized like bulls in Spanish culture or stags in British culture. The arrival of 4WD vehicles and automatic weapons in the 1940s meant that hunters could finally outpace the oryx – and in twenty years, they massacred virtually the whole population. A few breeding pairs were saved and flown to Phoenix, Arizona, to form the nucleus of a ‘World Herd’, from which all surviving oryx are now descended.
Since then various countries have brought in reintroduction programmes, but almost none meets international guidelines. Oman could not control poaching at its huge reserve on the Jiddat al-Harasis plain, reduced the boundaries and was struck off UNESCO’s World Heritage Site list. Dubai has a desert reserve, centred on the Al-Maha luxury hotel. Abu Dhabi has crammed hundreds of oryx (along with giraffe and heaven knows what else) onto the small Sir Bani Yas island and called it a wildlife park with – predictably – a luxury hotel. They’re repeating the theme at a desert reserve in the south, due to open later this year with another luxury hotel, Qasr al-Sarab. Jordan’s habitats have been destroyed by overgrazing of sheep and goats; its oryx have remained penned in a small reserve at Shaumari for the last 30 years.
Only in Saudi Arabia, where there is much less pressure for tourism development, has oryx reintroduction worked, at the immense Uruq Bani Maarid reserve in the Empty Quarter.
Now Abu Dhabi has struck a deal with Jordan to release oryx at Wadi Rum. Twenty animals were flown over earlier this year for acclimatization, and the enclosure gates were opened yesterday. Abu Dhabi newspaper The National sent a journalist – her report is here.
All looks great, eh? Nice, feel-good story.
Unfortunately, this is not good journalism. Jordan’s RSCN nature conservancy society has been conducting experiments in oryx release at Wadi Rum for the last 7 years – but Wadi Rum is not an oryx habitat. It’s too sandy and too mountainous: the oryx always roamed south and had to be brought back. Several died from broken legs sustained on the scree slopes. The RSCN eventually called a halt and pulled out. Then the semi-autonomous Aqaba Special Economic Zone Authority (a commercial body, not a conservation organization) stepped in to try and boost local income through increased tourism to the area. It is they, not the Jordanian government in Amman, who have struck the deal with Abu Dhabi: this oryx release is a laudable effort, but it has little or no scientific basis. It is economic. I have talked to several conservationists, including independent scientists with no axe to grind, who are well aware the release will fail.
The article is also littered with factual errors. Sheikh Zayed did make a contribution to saving the species from annihilation, but the real work had been done years before with the establishment of the World Herd. Oryx conservation projects are not ‘planned’ for Saudi Arabia, but have long been under way there.
And why did they send someone with poor Arabic? “Aion elmaha” – or, more properly, “ayoun al-maha” – does not mean ‘beautiful eyes’, but ‘the eyes of the oryx’.
As for a professional journalist recycling the sentimentality of the father standing with his hand on his son’s shoulder – well, there’s no accounting for taste.
A lazily written story, presented as if it’s the conclusion – save oryx, breed oryx, release oryx, job done.
In truth, this is just the start. What is now involved is a pouring of resources into making sure the oryx survive: manpower, cars, data collection, analysis, maintenance of GPS collars and monitoring equipment, perhaps intervention, enforcement of anti-poaching laws, environmental education for local people, development of tourism strategies… the list goes on! This is why poor countries like Jordan can’t afford to do it alone – and why a highly-placed source within the Jordanian conservation community told me that, given a choice, he’d prefer to drop the whole oryx programme and focus attention on something less expensive and more likely to succeed.
But the oryx has become a popular symbol of conservation (see logo), like the panda or the tiger – despite the fact that conservation science has moved on from spotlighting big mammals and is now devoted to broader, but less sexy, preservation of habitats (which ensures survival of hundreds of species together).
Once the oryx was allowed to be eliminated in the wild, reintroducing it means we have now become entangled in a never-ending story of management and control, pretty much in perpetuity – rather like with the bison in North America.
The Wadi Rum release is an interesting experiment, but it is not a “success story”. I’m disappointed in the usually excellent National, leaving its readers so ill-informed.
UPDATE (12 Sept 09): To their credit, The National sent the same reporter back to cover the story again a short time later – her second story, published 6th Sept, covers the issues much more clearly and accurately, I think. Thanks (and kudos) to her and the newspaper.
UPDATE 2 (also 12 Sept 09): My article on the conservation status of the Arabian oryx throughout the Middle East and Arabian Peninsula was published last week in Saudi Aramco World magazine – click here to read it. Let me know what you think by leaving a comment below…
A great story out of Dubai, where the transport authorities – to their credit – are trying to get people out of their cars and onto public transport.
As well as the new metro – which opens on 9th September (9/9/09 – don’t ask me what the significance is, other than a good headline) – there are several new bus routes coming in. But standing around by the side of the road in 50-degree heat isn’t very pleasant, so Dubai has air-conditioned its bus shelters.
(It’s so Dubai. But don’t get it mixed up with Dubai’s air-conditioned beach, which has now been abandoned, thank heavens…)
Good news is no news, so I missed it when the a/c shelters were put in.
But bad news sells – so it makes the National when the a/c shelters break down.
However, as the manufacturers pointed out, they only fail when it gets really hot outside… So, um, that’s OK then… The Kipp Report had it best: “The air-conditioners ‘trip at intervals’. Which intervals? Like, noon?”
Beyond Dubai, think of the applications: heated bus shelters in Britain, bear-proof bus shelters in Canada, bullet-proof bus shelters in New Orleans, life-support bus shelters in the Aussie outback…
Come on, give me some more ideas. Let’s get the world waiting for a bus in comfort…
First came this story, about how Israel’s UK tourist office approved a poster advertising tourism to Israel that included this map, which shows Gaza, the West Bank and the Golan Heights as integral parts of Israel. Even in the most Israel-friendly reading, few could dispute the fact that there is at least some, well, uncertainty both inside and outside Israel about the political status of these three areas. Who, then, is the Israel government trying to kid? You and me, it seems.
Then came this story about Israeli transport officials planning to impose Hebrew place names on locations throughout Israel. Tourists – and, apparently, locals – are “confused” by the lack of standardised spellings, so in future Nazareth will be signposted in English and Arabic as Natsrat, using the transliteration of its Hebrew name. Similarly Caesarea will be shown as Kesariya, Acre as Akko, Jaffa as Yafo.
If the advert map was (in the most generous interpretation) merely cackhanded mismanagement of spin, it’s hard to see this as anything other than part of an attempt to erase official recognition of any cultures other than Israeli Hebrew culture in these towns and cities.
Do they imagine that they are doing tourists a service by replacing Nazareth with Natsrat? Are they expecting the Arabic-speaking residents of Acre to suddenly start calling their own city Akko?
If the Swiss government in Bern were to issue a decree forbidding the mention of “Genève” and requiring Geneva to be signposted using only the German name Genf, it would (rightly) be interpreted as an attempt to deny the reality of that city’s francophone culture.
Who, then, are the Israeli government trying to kid by, in effect, trying to squeeze the very word Jaffa out of existence? Nobody but themselves, it seems.
As announced on Monday in The Bookseller, Penguin is to make 100 people at its London headquarters redundant, shunting them out into a depressed job market with one hand, while maintaining with the other that, “The market is alright, it’s not a disaster, this really isn’t about how we are trading.”
Baloney! It may not be a disaster for the Penguin chief executive, but it’s pretty miserable for the people being abandoned.
They also include “one or two” people at Rough Guides – part of Penguin Travel and publisher of three of my books.
I got an email yesterday from a senior editor at RGs saying that the first edition of a new title, which I was about to be contracted to write next year for publication in October 2011, has been “put on hold indefinitely”, since there will no longer be sufficient staff in-house to edit it – and no budget to outsource the editing to freelancers. I know, too, that other titles have gone down the swannee.
Meanwhile, John Makinson, chief executive of Penguin, “pointed to Penguin’s ’strong’ autumn schedule, and added that he expected to see a bounce-back in areas such as travel-guide publishing.”
Well, chum, it’s hard to bounce back when you cut new titles!
The message to aspiring travel writers, and old hacks alike, is to diversify or die. Put all your eggs into one basket and you expose yourself to the big heave-ho: freelancers are always the first to be “let go”. When I left my last proper job – as a Rough Guide editor – in 2003, I relied on that one company for virtually all my income, as both a staffer and a freelance author. Now, thankfully, I make my living from numerous sources. This cancellation is a blow, but what I didn’t have I won’t miss. Pity the people dumped by a company with a chief executive who has the gall to tell them “it’s not a disaster”.
Time to up the pace and start looking for more ways to earn…
I was lucky, a couple of years ago, to have been put in touch with Andrew Humphreys – formerly an author with Time Out and Lonely Planet (Egypt, Syria et al), ex-freelancer for Condé Nast Traveller etc. He’d just been appointed editor of Gulf Life, the new inflight magazine for Bahrain’s Gulf Air, to be published in London by Ink – and he was on the lookout for writers specialising in the Middle East. I pitched an idea or two, he said yes, and I’ve since become a regular: my two pieces in the current issue – a short look at cricket in Dubai and a longer article about the 19th-century rediscovery of Petra – bring me to 36 commissioned pieces in two years. Thanks, Andrew!
Ink are market leaders, producing 30+ inflight magazines for airlines all over the world, and have won fistfuls of design awards, including for Ryanair. It’s easy to see why. Gulf Air are not exactly the most prestigious of clients – a small, struggling state-owned carrier at the unfashionable end of the Gulf – but rather than copy the kind of instantly forgettable pap that’s churned out for Etihad and Emirates by Dubai-based magazine publishers, they’ve instead created something worthy of newsstand sale. My articles aside, it’s a genuinely interesting monthly about Middle East life and culture, with a dash of Mumbai, Kuala Lumpur and occasionally Paris and London thrown in. Take a look.
Do inflight magazines matter? My impression is they do. If they’re rubbish (which, let’s face it, most still are), all they do is reinforce to Ms/Mr Traveller the sense that both the airline and the destination it ‘represents’ are rubbish: at worst (stand up Air Malta and Saudi Airlines), they turn the airline and the destination into a laughing stock. At best (Gulf, Swiss, Air Canada) they lead you intelligently into the culture and the outlook of your destination while still in midair.
And for the hard-pressed travel writer, inflight magazines are a godsend: I write for 8 or 10 of them, and would find it that much harder to make ends meet without them.
A fine article in the Independent on Sunday by Joy Lo Dico about the resurgent interest in Lebanon in organic food, local food producers and traditional artisans – exemplified by the weekly Souk El Tayeb farmers’ market in Beirut.
Slightly odd to find it in the Travel section – it feels more like a food piece, or a straight feature – but I enjoyed the mood very much. An old woman who still makes traditional terracotta pots: “She had done it so many times that her hands had become her eyes.” Nice.
Makes me even more determined to get back to Lebanon before the end of the year. It’s been too long.
UPDATE (7 July): Lebanon set for record tourist season
Another Middle East megaproject trundles on, this time the $10-billion Marsa Zayed (‘Zayed Harbour’) development in Jordan’s Red Sea resort city of Aqaba.
For years Aqaba’s beaches played second fiddle to its port – which, during the 1990s, was the gateway for goods trucked to and from sanctions-bound Iraq. Since the creation of the low-tax Aqaba Special Economic Zone in 2001, investment (and, specifically, leisure and tourism investment) has skyrocketed.
I’m rather fond of Aqaba. It smells a bit, but (as I write in my ‘Rough Guide to Jordan’) it’s got a long history – and it feels like it doesn’t have anything to prove, which makes a change from the Gulf.
But ever since the municipality cut down almost all the beachfront palm trees in the 1960s, there’s been a slightly cock-eyed idea of progress in Aqaba. Marsa Zayed involves razing a low-income residential district in the city centre and moving its population to the outskirts. I look at the artist’s impressions of the marina, and my heart sinks.
Jordan only has 26km of Red Sea coastline. Are “high-rise residential towers” directly on the waterfront really the best use of it?
What’s missing from this press release, announcing InterContinental Hotels’ investment in Oman’s Al-Madina Az-Zarqa (“Blue City”) development?
Eagle-eyed readers will notice that there are no dates anywhere, other than a reference to Oman’s “Vision 2020″ project. From what I understand, Blue City – a Dubai-style megaproject – has been hit unusually hard by the downturn: six months ago it was “junked by Moody’s”, a credit-rating agency, and earlier this year one commentator said, “Even though Blue City is being funded by private financing, one suspects that considerable influence is being wielded to keep the project afloat.”
Does announcing hotel investment, but omitting any timescale, boost confidence? I’m not sure. With the greatest of respect to Oman, I’ll believe Blue City when I see it.
A fascinating article from 7iber.com (pronounce it “hibber”) about the difficulties for travellers attempting to use the King Hussein Bridge/Allenby Bridge border crossing over the River Jordan.
The author, Daoud Kuttab, is a renowned Palestinian journalist, and writes in detail about the tortuous border problems – and financial corruption involved – from a Palestinian perspective.
I’ve crossed here, both ways, maybe half a dozen times. Being a ‘foreigner’ (as opposed to a Jordanian, a Palestinian or an Israeli) it’s much, much easier to make the trip, but this nonetheless still rates as the longest, nastiest, least appealing border crossing I can think of. Not everyone, regrettably, shares my freedom to cross elsewhere.
It’s the perfect venue for a revelation – St Ethelburga’s, a 15th-century church in the City of London which was partly destroyed by an IRA truck bomb in 1993 and which has now been rebuilt to serve as a centre for reconciliation and peace. I was there yesterday for a meeting about raising the profile in Britain of the Abraham Path – a walking route through the Middle East linking sites of Abrahamic interest about which I’ve already blogged (see below) and published (see sidebar).
I went expecting milky tea and earnest vicars – and instead, in a quiet moment sitting at the back, glimpsed the future of tourism.
The revelation came courtesy of Daniel Adamson, former trekking guide for ATG Oxford, now based in Beirut as Director of Communications for the Abraham Path (and just about the least stereotypical PR you could ever meet; sorry PRs). This is how he explained it.
Web 1.0 was where a webmaster presented a site for ‘consumption’ by individuals; it was, if you like, a mediated experience, where end-users had little or no say in what was presented. They browsed. This is still mostly how TV, radio and newspapers operate (and long may it continue; it has a purpose).
Web 2.0, on the other hand – as Wikipedia defines it – “refers to a second generation of web development and design that facilitates communication, information sharing, interoperability and collaboration”. Design creativity flows to and fro between webmaster and ‘consumer’, ideas are shared and websites are no longer shop-windows, developing, instead, into meeting-places. There’s a nice visualization of the difference here at Sizlopedia.com.
The concept is exemplified by Facebook, Twitter, Flickr – websites which create nothing but which serve at platforms where individuals can meet and create on their own terms.
Tourism remains stuck in a 1.0 mindset. Most travellers, most of the time, get a mediated experience of their destination – variations on the well-worn theme of the 1970s-style package holiday, where you pay someone on your local high street (or your computer screen) to sort the whole thing out for you. This ‘expert’ tour operator then shepherds you – and a bunch of other people – from the airport to the destination and back again. The tour operator acts as webmaster, while their customers browse pre-selected attractions with impotent docility. Destinations become mere shop-windows.
What the Abraham Path Initiative is trying to do is not construct a path, or develop tourism, or act as guide or tour operator. They want to be a platform, upon which individuals can create their own experience of these destinations. They are network facilitators, trying to establish a system within which travel can return to being a means by which people can meet other people, unmediated by ‘experts’.
Tourism 2.0 is scary – like Web 2.0 is scary – because it highlights the fact that you will only get out of your holiday what you are prepared to put into it. You create your own experience, and you meet a whole bunch of unexpected people and challenges along the way. The end is likely to be different from how you imagined… if you ever reach the end; Tourism 2.0 begins to erase the differences between ‘home’ and ‘destination’.
Tourism 2.0 also means travel can finally lose its Noughties’ laziness. A journey can become a journey again.
Lots of people will prefer the 1.0 model: tour operators and ground agents still have a long and lucrative life ahead.
And, of course, truly independent travellers – who do their own research and make their own decisions – will thrive, as they always have done (and always will).
But those travellers who fall between the two – disliking the commercialism of the travel industry, but seeking some structure, theme or direction for their journey – finally have a model to aspire to, and to develop on their own terms. Lots of 1.0 operators have been trying to find them, dreaming up specialist small-group low-impact tours, voluntourism and all sorts of niche products. But it’s all still 1.0. And, I’m afraid, it all rubs me up the wrong way.
The Abraham Path are breaking new ground – literally and metaphorically. I won’t blether on any more but I had an exciting day, imagining the possibilities for Tourism 2.0.
But I’m only a journalist – what do travel professionals think of this? Am I being idealistic, or is there the nugget of a genuine innovation here? The economics of creating a Tourism 2.0 platform are not easy to pin down – has anyone got any ideas? Love to hear your thoughts.
Just picked up this story about a new luxury resort in Ras Al-Khaimah, to be run by Banyan Tree. I saw it under development when I was in RAK earlier this year, on the back of a trip to Arabian Travel Market. RAK’s an odd place – but I rather liked it. It’s the most northerly of the Emirates, and so under the least influence from Dubai and Abu Dhabi; mainly industrial, lots of cement factories (and they’re very proud of their ceramics), very ordinary – but set amid extraordinary landscapes. In tourism terms, it seemed to me that its greatest asset was access to the mountains and coastline of the Musandam peninsula, an exclave of Omani territory to the north and east. Musandam is fabulous; no space to talk about it here, but if you haven’t been – go.
I was taken for a dhow ride through Musandam’s fjords…
…I stayed at the Khatt Hotel, a modest local four-star alongside hot springs in RAK’s hills, and took a 4WD trip from RAK into Wadi Bih, a rocky gorge system that cuts through the Hajar mountains, shared between Oman and the UAE.
There’s climbing, paragliding, long-distance trekking up here. The mountain culture is quite different from the coastal lowlands; you’re a million miles from Dubai and its trashy desert safaris. Khasab has got a near-monopoly on dhow rides and leisure cruises around this extraordinarily beautiful coast, but there’s no reason why RAK shouldn’t have a slice of that pie, too. The potential is huge for RAK (with or without Khasab) to become the only place offering this kind of off-the-beaten-track, nature-based independent tourism anywhere between the Mediterranean and India. In so doing, it could also pick up a substantial slice of business from visitors (not just Western) who are bored with Dubai’s high life aspirations.
Instead, RAK – like Abu Dhabi, like Qatar, like just about everybody in the Middle East – is busy chasing the top end of the market. (And not just Banyan Tree: RAK is also building Marjan Island offshore, an imitation of Dubai’s Palm/World idea.) I’m not a big fan of luxury resorts. I think they isolate tourists and are an attempt to ring-fence local culture, discouraging interaction. Perhaps in some places that’s the point. It certainly feels that way in the Gulf. But ring-fencing culture doesn’t preserve it. It corrupts it. Arguably, that’s what has got Dubai into the pickle it’s currently in, with massive misunderstanding (leading to ’sex on the beach’, among other shenanigans), alienation, resentment, even suspicion.
RAK – and Abu Dhabi, Qatar and others – seem scared of mass tourism. They look at Dubai and Sharm El-Sheikh and shy away from midrange development, imagining it will only cause ‘problems’. Their default response is to aim squarely for the super-rich. But that’s a mistake. Independent midrange tourism could do more for RAK and the others than any amount of luxury, diverting income to the grass roots, fostering entrepreneurship, massively improving public image abroad, boosting pride, exposing locals (Asian expats, Western expats and Emiratis alike) to new ideas… but, ah. Maybe the ruling families don’t want new ideas. Maybe they think tourism will erode their culture (though British culture is still alive and kicking despite – or perhaps because of – 25 million tourists a year, as is Italian, French, Spanish, Thai, Mexican…). Maybe they think tourists only want luxury. Maybe they think nobody wants to get hot and thirsty exploring the mountains. Maybe they think the UAE hasn’t got that much to offer, and so should just play it safe by going with the tried-and-trusted formula of luxury resort developments. Maybe they think the luxury market has more economic potential – and more prestige – than the midrange.
If so, I think they’re wrong on every score.
Some cash-strapped countries have trouble seeing how the returns on independent, nature-based tourism could make it viable for them (Jordan, for instance). For the Gulf states, whose reasons for launching tourism at all have much less to do with income than image, it seems perverse to just fall back on more (and more) luxury. RAK could be the world’s next big adventure destination. It has the terrain. All that’s needed is a bit of independent thinking.
Just heard that Jordanian tour guide Yamaan Safady has been shortlisted for the Paul Morrison Guide Awards 2009, run by Wanderlust magazine in the UK.
Fantastic news! Yamaan is a great guy, and he knows Jordan’s backcountry like nobody else. Looking forward to the awards ceremony in October…
UPDATE (12 Sept 09): Check out this fantastic 4min video, uploaded yesterday to YouTube, in support of Yamaan’s nomination…
UPDATE (14 Oct 09): Click here to find out how Yamaan did…
It’s been a few days since I had a chance to blog – not least because I’m now away updating my Rough Guide to Switzerland (writing this on the TGV from Zurich to Basel). I’ve had it in mind to put down something about this BBC story profiling a group calling themselves the Jerusalem Peacemakers – Palestinian and Israeli community leaders who not only envision compromise but actively live compromise, meeting together, praying together, fostering cross-cultural interaction and dialogue. What an inspiration, when politics all around is lurching to the racist right.
One of the most interesting things was Rabbi Froman’s affirming the possibility of maintaining viable Jewish communities under Palestinian rule within a Palestinian state on the West Bank – surely a ‘third way’ between the expansionist status quo (immoral and profoundly damaging) and a Gaza-style settler clearance (inconceivable under current conditions, it seems to me). I would love to talk to him about it – and to try and gauge Arab opinion about Sheikh Bukhari in Jerusalem and Ibtisam Mahameed in Faradis. Are they admired? Respected? Marginalised? Ridiculed?
…but I’m not going to blog about that.
Instead I’m going to blog about this story in yesterday’s Jordan Times – which I followed as it unfolded on Queen Rania’s Twitter page. The Queen and Minister of Tourism went to Rasoun, a small village in northern Jordan, to mark the launch of the ministry’s project establishing walking trails in under-developed rural areas. I was in Rasoun a few weeks ago for the Independent: it’s a simple country town, set in a beautiful landscape of forested hills. Down in the valleys, streams water orchards of fig, olive and pomegranate. Up on the slopes are a few hard-to-find towns: Rasoun itself, Orjan, Baoun, with some smaller villages, linked by goat tracks. Some people are farmers, but most are public sector employees: civil servants, police, army.
Last year I also passed through Rasoun during a stay in a nature reserve run by Jordan’s Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature (RSCN), which occupies a swathe of forest on the hilltop nearby. They operate a network of rural trails through the reserve, crossing Rasoun’s remote countryside.
Then I revisited the area this April to walk the Al-Ayoun Trail, a separate concern originating in a cooperative effort among the local villagers to introduce tourism to their area. This has been fostered by the Abraham Path Initiative (API), an American organisation seeking to establish an international walking route linking sites of Abrahamic interest across the Middle East. I’ve written in more detail about the Abraham Path for Wanderlust magazine and the Times. The API discussed cooperation with the RSCN in Rasoun, but were rebuffed (so I understand) by the RSCN’s policy of insisting that anyone walking on its paths must pay for an RSCN guide to accompany them. So instead the Al-Ayoun Trail runs around the reserve perimeter, purposely routed through the villages in order to encourage interaction between walkers and villagers.
Now the Jordan Times is reporting how the Ministry of Tourism wants to establish its own, compeletely separate walking paths in the Rasoun area, following neither the RSCN’s routes nor the existing Al-Ayoun Trail.
It’s a circus! From five years ago, when Rasoun was unknown and unvisited, suddenly everyone from lowly British hacks to the Queen herself are busy visiting, talking and planning. The poor Rasounis must be wondering what they’ve done to deserve it.
Why isn’t everyone co-operating? The background is complicated, but it boils down to this. The RSCN don’t like to work with anyone else: they set their own rules, devise their own business plans and pursue their own goals. They also have closer links with the Ministry of Environment than the Ministry of Tourism, who tend, as a consequence, to leave them alone.
The API has a different vision: their raison d’etre is to bring travellers and local people into contact with one another. For them, the RSCN’s trails, which bypass centres of population to traverse wild countryside, miss the point.
Yet the Jordanian tourism ministry, for its part, is suspicious of the API, since the Al-Ayoun Trail is intended to form one link in the longer Abraham Path (map here), which will connect across the border into Palestine and Israel. The underlying idea – to encourage Jordanians to follow the pilgrimage route into Israel and to encourage Israelis to walk the path in Jordan – is anathema to mainstream Jordanian opinion. The government, I’m sure, feels like it can’t be seen to condone such overt ‘normalisation’, let alone support it. Yet promoting rural development through sustainable tourism is a key theme in the government’s – and the king’s – plans for the next few years, especially in the beautiful, downtrodden region around Rasoun. So with the API cold-shouldered, and the RSCN playing the lone wolf, the government has chosen to go it alone, drawing in (to my knowledge) at least one ex-API specialist to help map new walking routes that follow none of the existing paths.
But how unseemly it all is! Rasoun is such a little place, in an unregarded corner of a much-overlooked country – does it merit a squabble? Aside from anything else, I wonder how sustainable three separately plotted, separately waymarked, separately guided (and, no doubt, separately charged) walking routes can be, in this tiny backwater.
The worst is that everybody is fighting about promoting walking and the enjoyment of nature! It’s such a simple idea: meet, talk, walk, for the benefit of all. Make contact through the physicality of walking on the land, and it becomes possible not just to share experience, but to compare experience. But if nobody can agree in Rasoun, what hope is there for the bigger picture?
Those who plough on regardless hoping or imagining that competing interests will just fade away are condemned to a life in denial. That applies in politics just as much as in business – or in building communities. Ideas are nothing without people. It seems that the Jerusalem Peacemakers – unlike almost everyone else – have realised that to bring about a desired goal (peace) you have to work with all the resources available to you (settlers, non-settlers, Palestinians inside and outside Israel, Jews, Muslims…). The Jordanian tourism authorities, if they wish to bring about the goal of sustainable rural development through tourism, should also be working with all the resources they have – which include, in this case, both the RSCN and the API. Even if the prospect of Israelis walking in the Rasoun hills upsets them, they should hold their noses and work to make it happen. Benefit may accrue – and ignoring the problem will not make it go away.
Just picked up the new Lonely Planet Middle East book, 6th edition, May 2009. Pretty much exactly the same page-count as the previous edition (700-odd), but coverage has shrunk to the core Turkey-to-Egypt countries plus Iraq – there chiefly for the Kurdistan section. Libya and Iran have both been left out this time – quite rightly; they don’t belong in a Middle East book – but rather than cut the book back accordingly and save 120pp, LP have instead kept it at the same size and expanded detail on the remaining countries.
