A Wadi Runs Through It
Late in 2010, a US magazine editor gave me a tip about an environmental scheme in the Saudi capital Riyadh that was up for a major international prize, the Aga Khan Award for Architecture. They were keen for me to do a story.
The scheme – which has transformed Riyadh’s main Wadi Hanifah watercourse from a polluted dumping ground into a showpiece array of lakefront parks and water recycling – won the award, and the magazine, Saudi Aramco World, ran my story in their Jan/Feb 2012 issue under the title “A Wadi Runs Through It”. Click here to read it.
I also developed the theme elsewhere, including for the BBC, who broadcast my radio script today in the From Our Own Correspondent strand (audio begins 11’40″) and repackaged it as a news story here.
Wadi Hanifah astounds from just about every angle. In environmental, engineering, design and architecture terms it is groundbreaking: conception, execution and finishing are immaculate from beginning to end (PDF 3MB). And in terms of urban planning, economics, social development and even global diplomacy, Wadi Hanifah provides a fascinating commentary on the priorities and mindset of the Saudi government, not least on its deployment of resources. Riyadh gains this billion-dollar redevelopment while the sewers in Jeddah overflow, people continue to live in poverty and human rights are severely restricted. As I mention in the BBC story, “greenwash” is playing its part.
The wadi’s role in Saudi history, and the fact that this physical link between Dir’iyyah and Riyadh – evoking Ibn Abdul-Wahhab and Ibn Saud – has had such attention lavished on it is also no coincidence.
Yet at least the project’s existence is allowing these issues to be aired – and, ultimately, the people of Riyadh get to enjoy the benefits over their barbecues every weekend. Each babystep towards progressive social integration, however left-field, should be welcomed.
The story’s big takeaway is that environmental conservation is not just about birds and animals, but society as a whole. It is healthy, in every sense of the word. And in tourism terms, how many Middle Eastern capitals have a 50km-long nature trail running through them? I’d love to return to Riyadh and do a story on slow travel, taking a couple of days to cycle through Wadi Hanifah from one end of the city to the other without once venturing onto asphalt. Anyone care to join me?
Mad and bad
Ein Bokek, Israel
Mad (and bad) tourism news out of Israel, talking about a mammoth proposed development on their side of the Dead Sea, encompassing an unstated number of new hotels and spas. Read it and weep.
A couple of points.
The Dead Sea is collapsing. Because of the desperate shortage of water in the Middle East (Israel’s neighbour Jordan is one of the five driest countries in the world), the Dead Sea’s freshwater inflow has been dammed and underlying aquifers have been tapped beyond sustainable levels – not just by Israel, but by Jordan and, upstream, Syria too.
The Dead Sea surface is dropping by a metre a year. That’s a bit under an inch a week. Shoreline sinkholes are opening up because the ground is now so unstable. Hotels built on the beach 20 years ago are now marooned a mile from the water.
The most seductive plan to reverse the damage – the Red-Dead Canal – is challenged by environmentalists as too slow, too expensive and too uncertain. They say the most effective way to save the Dead Sea is to alter existing habits of unsustainable exploitation.
So up steps Israel with a hotel plan that is explicitly, and deliberately, exploitative.
The idea, so the article (presumably sourced from government PR) says, is to “emulate the spas and hotels on the [Jordanian] shore”. With the new Crowne Plaza (not yet open to the public), Jordan now has six Dead Sea hotels. At the Ein Bokek resort alone, Israel already has at least 14 hotels (I was once told 26 but that may have been an exaggeration), plus around half a dozen smaller establishments nearby – and that’s not counting the hotels at Ein Gedi just up the coast.
Kempinski Dead Sea, Jordan
If Jordan’s Dead Sea hotels lie “at the heart of [the country's] tourism success” – which is debatable, incidentally – it’s because they’re world-class, not because they’re huge (they’re not) or because there are lots of them (there aren’t).
The concrete tourist pen of Ein Bokek, by contrast, is horrible, not least because it doesn’t stand beside open water, but by one of the industrial evaporation ponds which extract minerals from Dead Sea water. Here’s a story about it.
If Israel really wants to take a leaf out of Jordan’s book, it should bulldoze Ein Bokek and start again.
The Dead Sea’s “barren hills”, blithely mentioned for asphalting in the article, may look barren to a big-city hotel developer, but are better characterised as a unique wilderness habitat worthy of conservation. Such a scheme could generate jobs, tourism dollars, sustainable socio-economic development and perhaps a whisper of global prestige.
Yet the Knesset had NIS850m (US$220m; £135m) burning a hole in its pocket – so it asked the Israeli public how to spend it.
As Henry Ford once famously remarked, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
Mind you, if the Red-Dead Canal works and the Dead Sea starts filling up again, the whole miserable scheme could be underwater in twenty years. Nature always finds a way.
Overguiding: notes from a gilded cage
Digital was supposed to liberate travel.
Once, travel was about putting yourself out there. You went to a new place, and you figured stuff out. You got things wrong. You paid too much. Maybe you carried a guidebook – but they were sketchy at best. Hand-drawn maps. Skimpy on the detail (the 1987 Lonely Planet guide covered Jordan and Syria in 200 pages: the current LP Jordan alone is 360 pages). Dodgy, pennypinching advice (“Carry a pocketful of Smash with you, so the first time it rains you get a free meal” – apocryphal line from an unspecified guidebook, as related to me by a veteran writer in the late 90s. He was joking. I think.).
Now, though, there’s an urgency in the air. An author friend recently sent in his updated chapter on Palma de Mallorca, only for the editor to return it because he hadn’t supplied a street address for the cathedral. Another friend, working on a Cotswolds app, was required to find every public wifi hotspot between Cheltenham and Oxford, with price where applicable. Another, in Tuscany, was told to supply phone numbers for every church.
27.175444,78.042096 – Taj Mahal, Taj Ganj, Agra (U.P.) 282 001, India
Then there are the geocodes. Rough Guides have abandoned – for now – their newly announced requirement for authors to supply geocodes for every named building, attraction, point of interest, hotel, restaurant, bar, shop, cow and haystack, after authors (I’ve been one for the last 15 years) jumped up and down and shouted a lot about copyright and workload and other stuff, but the requirement will no doubt resurface in some other form, sooner or later. Geocodes in NYC or NSW I can understand – they can be useful in a big city – but geocodes in the Jordanian desert? As part of ordinary guide content for people touring around? Put the damn phone away. Talk to the bedouin. Look at the road. If there is one.
If you think travel is a sequence of unconnected dots which need linking, knowing geocodes make perfect sense. But if you think travel is about people, local knowledge, local stories, landscapes, journeys and experiences, knowing geocodes is about as useful as knowing the Taj Mahal’s address.
But the impulse to overguide doesn’t stop there.
When is a price not a price?
Since Rough Guides started, in 1982, they’ve had a system of price codes for accommodation: the author draws up nine brackets relating to the price for a double room in high season (e.g. 1 Under $10; 2 $10-20; 3 $20-30; and so on) so that every hotel in the book is given a price code, indicating an approximate range. When you’re travelling you quickly establish that hotels in, say, the 3 or 4 brackets suit you, so your eye goes straight to them. Or you stick with 1s and 2s – or you splurge on a 9.
It was a rough guide – and it matched what travel is like. But if you have that system you HAVE to tell the reader what the price code means. Rough Guides took their eye off the ball. With tweak after design tweak they hid the info that explained the price code system. You had to read the whole book to know where it was. By the end it was squashed into the gutter of the inside back cover, between some corporate blurb and the photo credits. It forced you to keep flipping to and fro. So when Rough Guides went to focus groups (oh yes, publishers pay through the nose to find out what you think), they realised people had to flip to and fro. Nobody explained price codes, so readers didn’t understand them. What does 5 mean? Where’s the price?
As of this year, Rough Guides have abandoned price codes. Now they will – like Lonely Planet – list an actual price for every hotel. Good, eh? Progress?
“In the book”
Except most hotels don’t have an actual price. There are different rates depending on how you book – direct, through a local travel agent, through a travel agent at home, through an online booking system, and so on. Prices shift according to demand. And season. And how far in advance you book. Some hotels offer cut-price deals every weekend; others drop prices midweek. There may be a range of room types, at different prices on different days. And then, of course, this year’s price is out of date before it can even be published.
A single price is actually a lie. It looks like it’s pinpoint accurate, putting power in the hands of the consumer – and it lets the publisher boast about how great their book is – but it’s really hiding the truth, and it’s really misleading the reader. A range of prices would be more honest, more accurate and more informative. Something like, ooh, a price code would do the job really well.
Hoteliers, too, prefer price codes, because they know that the inevitable result of quoting a price to a guidebook writer is that, 12 or 18 months down the line (if they’re lucky; perhaps years in the future), some white-kneed foreigner will be standing in reception, stabbing his fat finger into a guidebook and demanding a room AT THAT EXACT PRICE and not a penny more “because it says so in the book”.
Need to know
Online updates, in one form or another, get around some of that – but which publisher is going to pay to have authors keying in updated prices for every hotel in every book, every six months? Apps go out of date too; it’s just, when you download them, it doesn’t feel that way. They feel permanently new. Another lie.
The awful truth is that PEOPLE DON’T NEED TO KNOW an exact price for a hotel; they just need to know roughly how much to expect, then they can check out the booking options for themselves. They don’t need to know phone numbers for all the museums in Yerevan. They don’t need their mass-market guidebook to Oman or Brazil to be quoting geocodes for every village (unless they’re on a serious offroading expedition, in which case they wouldn’t be buying the Rough Guide anyway). It’s a waste of everyone’s time.
One researcher can’t find every public hotspot in a single city, let alone an entire region – and even if they did, what value would that information have in 3 months, when it’s only 95% accurate? And 12 months, when it’s 75% right?
The gilded cage
Overguiding – turn-by-turn directions, precise information that isn’t precise, contact information for places nobody needs to contact, illusory prices – is a gilded cage. It’s like Google: apparently beneficent, actually evil. We’ve been seduced by it, imagining all this information makes us more powerful, more knowledgeable, more travel-savvy. In truth, it traps us, by cutting off the need to explore. It packages the world; it’s an attempt to eliminate strangeness that is doomed to fail, because travel is strange. What does travel mean – in Cheltenham, as in Kamchatka, as in your very own street – if not finding stuff out for yourself?
Newspapers and travel magazines do it too, with their relentless Top 10s and Best Ofs – gutting and filleting destinations to shield us from the horror of Getting Something Wrong. Eating an unremarkable meal. Sightseeing in a touristy part of town. Sleeping in an ordinary hotel. The shame.
But who’s kidding who, here? If overguiding is bad for readers, bad for writers, bad for travellers and bad for locals, why do publishers do it? Who benefits?
Independent travel in Israel
After my piece on independent travel in Palestine, published last month in Wanderlust (UK), here is my follow-up article on Israel. You can click on each page to see a close-up version. I meant the two articles to be read in tandem, and I tried as best I could to match experiences in both places – rural walks, “dangerous” towns, microbreweries… Let me know if I succeeded or (more important) not – and why!
UPDATE: full text reproduced here
Social media and the Holy City
In case you still think Twitter is just a bunch of narcissists discussing what they had for breakfast, a couple of months ago, while tweeting about pitching to editors, I got a public reply from Jane Knight, travel editor at the Times, asking why I never pitched to her anymore.
Laziness? I um’d and ah’d for a bit, then emailed her an idea for a story about a new hotel opening in East Jerusalem – in fact, the first new luxury hotel to open there in almost 50 years, the St George.
Luckily, she commissioned me – and the piece appeared in the paper today (subscribers only). She also took two more ideas from me. Thank you, Jane. Travel eds: please form an orderly queue. Travel hacks: Twitter works.
As for the story itself, I think it’s a cracker – how many hotels can claim to have been their city’s first new luxury property twice? Click here to view the article – or click on the embedded image to enlarge.
Independent travel in Palestine
I was lucky enough, last year, to be asked by Wanderlust magazine here in the UK to write two features for them on independent travel in the Middle East – one on Palestine, the other on Israel. The Palestine one has just been published; here it is, scanned from the printed pages. The Israel one follows next month. Do let me know what you think – leave a comment below.
Libyans in Amman
Last month I had an email from a hotelier friend in Jordan, bemoaning a drop in occupancy rates – down in his hotel from 64% in 2010 to 44% last year – and mentioning, in passing, the quantity of Libyans now staying full-board at hotels in Amman.
Libyans? At hotels in Amman?
When I got to Jordan I made a few phone calls. It seemed to me there was an untold story there. I was lucky enough to be able to discuss it with Jordan’s Minister of Tourism, Nayef Al Fayez, and the president of the Jordan Hotel Association, Michel Nazzal, who both kindly took time out of their schedules to meet me.
Then, with the help of the remarkable, and remarkably generous, Lina Ejeilat, editor-in-chief at Jordan’s 7iber.com, I managed to find and interview some of the Libyans receiving treatment in Amman’s Jordan Hospital.
This photo (above) shows Ali Muhammad Albusaifi, 24, who’d spent most of 2011 fighting Gaddafi’s forces and was now recuperating from leg injuries. “I want to keep on fighting. I just don’t know who,” he told me.
This photo (above) is of his friend Muftah Al Sadeq Belhaish, 23, a unit commander from the Jabal Nafusa mountains of western Libya, who’d been shot through the shoulder early in the conflict but had never received proper treatment, and had fought on for another 9 months.
Lina and I talked to them (and other patients) for some time. What these young men went through doesn’t bear thinking about. Their courage and resilience is exceptional.
I wrote a script for BBC radio’s From Our Own Correspondent.
The item aired on Radio 4 in the UK on 26th January - click here for my bit – and globally on the BBC World Service one day later. I am pasting the transcript below. I hope you like it.
For hoteliers in the Jordanian capital Amman, January can be miserable. It’s the lowest of low seasons for Western tourists, who prefer the temperate months of spring and autumn. And long-stay Arab tourists, who escape the heat of the Gulf to spend cooler summer holidays near the Med, won’t arrive for another six months.
Yet this week, even in the depths of winter, the smiles are broad all across Jordan’s hospitality sector, thanks to an unexpected Libyan windfall.
Amman is a highland city. When I drove in from the airport it was not so much raining as condensing: the misty air was grey and saturated, and it was bitter cold, high above sea level amid precipitous urban hills.
The lobby of my hotel was steamy and crowded with pretty scruffy-looking characters, lounging in tracksuits on the sleek, ultra-modern furniture, arguing in an accented Arabic I couldn’t place.
“We are suffering a bit,” hotel manager Ibrahim Karajeh told me. “These Libyans are not well educated and they talk loudly – but they’re making good revenue. This is very low season for us but I’m having to turn business away.”
Jordan was a key Arab ally for Libya’s rebel armies during last year’s revolution, supplying logistical and military aid. Now, it seems, payback time has come. Lacking both hospital infrastructure and medical expertise, post-war Libya is flying thousands of its citizens abroad for treatment, including at Jordanian hospitals, widely regarded as the best in the Middle East. Medical bills, lodging and three meals a day are being paid for by Libya’s new government, the National Transitional Council. Officials tour Amman weekly, settling hotel and hospital bills in cash – and handing out $300 (roughly £190) per person per week as pocket money.
The arrangement began last summer, for fighters who had been seriously injured in combat – but the trickle has become a flood since the death of Colonel Gaddafi three months ago.
I sat in on a discussion between Michel Nazzal, president of the Jordan Hotel Association, and Nayef Al Fayez, Jordan’s Minister of Tourism. Every three-, four- and five-star hotel in the capital is full. 26 planes arrived last week from Libya. Amman, they told me, is hosting 14,000 Libyans.
But the minister is not complaining. “We need them!” he said, with a genial smile. “It’s good for business.”
That’s undeniable. I would estimate Libya is pumping around £10m ($15m) a week into the Jordanian retail economy. That excludes income from hospital bills, which could also be substantial.
In a modest, resource-poor country which saw a 40% drop in tourism last year, that’s no small windfall. According to hotelier Charl Twal, the Libyans are “saving Amman”.
Across town in the private, 300-bed Jordan Hospital, administrator Amany Khatab told me since November they’d treated 465 Libyans as inpatients – but many more as outpatients. “Minor cases would have surgery during the day,” she explained, “then go back to the hotel, and return next morning.”
She walked me along broad, brightly lit corridors, spotless and quiet. Doctors smiled in greeting.
At bed 128 on the 1st floor, 62-year-old Saleh Muhammad Suleiman passed a tired hand over a white beard. He’d arrived three weeks earlier from his home in the eastern Libyan city of Tobruk for treatment for chronic hypertension. “We were relying on foreign doctors,” he told me. “But they all went home during the war.”
Two of Suleiman’s sons fought against Gaddafi. “Libya has a good future,” he said, gesturing with his cannulated right hand. “The people running the government are young. They know what is best.”
On another corridor, Ali Muhammad Albusaifi was on crutches. His leg had been fractured in Zawiya, early in the fighting. Then he’d fought in Zintan, before spending the summer smuggling weapons into government-held Tripoli. “We’d come in at night,” the 24-year-old told me, “bringing guns in rubbish bins or under cars.”
Then, in October, in Bani Walid, his convoy had taken a direct hit. He’d been thrown high in the air, landing on rocks, breaking his nose and teeth, damaging his hearing and tearing muscles in both legs.
“It’s a fantastic feeling,” he said, with a hollow-eyed smile. “But we never imagined any of this before.”
What had life been like under Gaddafi, I asked.
“I don’t want to rewind,” he said, gazing at the floor. “We have strong national bonds –” and he twined his fingers together to demonstrate. Then he shrugged angrily, a mixed-up young man, who’d already seen too much violence in his life.
With pathos, and some despair, he added, “I want to keep on fighting. I just don’t know who.”
Even though Libya is successfully outsourcing treatment, healing, it seems, must start at home.
