I’m going to ignore the spurious nature of the “research” – no sample size given, no date of survey, no indication of sample selection or basis on which figures have been collated – and the meaningless use of random numbers to create a false impression. I’m even going to overlook the fact that the Co-op, supposedly an ethical organisation, appears to be promoting all-inclusive package holidays in developing-world countries (if you care about the destinations you visit, all-inclusives are just about the worst way to travel, since virtually all your money stays within global corporations instead of going to the people who are hosting you).

Instead, I’m going to look at the main message.

Morocco, Egypt, Tunisia and Turkey are now apparently being called the “Mett”. What the hell is wrong with the travel industry? Why can’t they just be normal? Why has everything got to be a buzzword? Does anyone nickname Greece, Italy and Turkey the “GIT” countries? How about Spain, Portugal And Morocco becoming “SPAM”?

I’ve never heard such a load of Belgium Or LUXembourg.

Bad statistics, bad holidays, bad PR.

Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah. One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot.

The reference is to Fadlallah, a prominent Lebanese Shia cleric, who died on July 4th. Nasr later explained her comments in a detailed blog post, in which she regretted trying to encapsulate a complex thought in a 140-character tweet.

CNN is not my favourite news source, and I hold no candle for Nasr, but to fire her shows a lack of judgement on CNN’s part that far overshadows Nasr’s indiscretion.

It reminds me of what happened when Barbara Plett, a BBC reporter in Ramallah, admitted crying at the death of Yasser Arafat. This is the transcript of Plett’s report. There was an outcry following its broadcast in 2004. An internal BBC enquiry later found that she had broken the BBC’s rules on impartiality (report here). Plett was mothballed for a while, and then reposted to a different part of the world.

But she was not fired.

Journalism is a difficult job. The days of rigid impartiality are, it often seems, over: in their place have come a welter of consciously partial news sources. In old media that shows itself in the nonsense extremes of, for example, Fox News and Press TV – and the very raison d’etre of new media is to supply multiple voices on every issue, to cover all angles. The onus has shifted, to a greater or lesser degree, onto the news consumer to take responsibility for filtering and processing the information they receive.

In claiming that Nasr’s credibility had been ‘compromised’ by her tweet, CNN is wrong. Nasr’s credibility is, rather, enhanced by it – not because Fadlallah was necessarily an admirable figure, but because her tweet demonstrates that she grasps nuance, and understands that the profoundly complex and contradictory realm of Middle East politics is not populated by one-dimensional figures who are purely good or purely evil, but by ordinary human beings who can hold outrageous, racist views and praise those who murder innocent civilians while simultaneously supporting progressive causes and benefiting their co-religionists and wider society. Life is not black and white. You are not either “for us or against us”.

The BBC placed more value on retaining the skills and expertise of Plett – who, undoubtedly, became a better, more cautious journalist because of the controversy – than on satisfying political calls for her to go. In doing so, they recognized the value of always trying to seek impartiality, but the unlikelihood of a single individual – let alone an entire organization – ever being able to achieve it.

By firing Octavia Nasr, CNN has, in contrast, shown itself to be a deeply reactionary, conservative organization – either more interested in toeing party-political lines than in seeking the truth, or (somehow worse) believing itself to be impartial, and thus perfect, already.

CNN has soiled its journalistic credentials, and rendered itself untrustworthy. More fool them.

Credit: BBC

Acknowledgement for a worthy award-winner. Yesterday Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s Middle East editor, was presented with the Charles Wheeler Award 2010 for achievements in broadcast journalism.

Amid the screech of grinding axes that characterises much coverage of events in the Middle East, Jeremy Bowen has, to my mind, always maintained a calm, old-school approach to reporting – saying what’s happened today, and putting it into the context of what happened yesterday (and, occasionally, what might happen tomorrow). Nobody I’m aware of in English-language media around the world is as skilled a communicator in explaining for a general audience just what the heck the fighting is all about.

He’s the embodiment of the fact that, blogging and ‘citizen journalism’ notwithstanding, trained journalists working in old media really, really matter.

Congratulations, Jeremy. Thank you, BBC.

Credit: jewlicious.com

Ahead of a forthcoming trip to Palestine and Israel, a couple of days ago I went to check the weather on my iPhone’s preinstalled Yahoo weather app. Tel Aviv loaded fine, but it was when I did a search for Jerusalem that the oddness began.

I started by typing “Jerus” – waiting for Yahoo’s database to find the most obvious entry. It came up with “Jerusalem, Ohio” top of the list. Bizarre. So I carried on typing, till “Jerusalem” sat in the search bar. Pause for search. Top of the list now? “West Jerusalem, Yerushalayim“. ['Yerushalayim' is the Hebrew name for Jerusalem.] Huh? There was no weather forecast for the city of Jerusalem, only for West Jerusalem. Even in the mad world of Middle East politics, that made no sense.

So I sighed and loaded the weather page for West Jerusalem, then tried to find the weather for the half of the city that I’m going to visit. There was nothing under “Jerusalem”. After failing with “Quds”, “Palestine” and various combinations thereof, I finally found it. “East Jerusale” brought up Gangtok in India (huh again?), but if you add that final M you get “East Jerusalem, West Bank“. Extraordinary.

So I loaded both. Incidentally, they’re identical.

Conclusions? On the one hand, if you type “Jerusalem” you only get West Jerusalem. On the other hand, it’s now possible to have the weather solely for East Jerusalem on your iPhone if you persevere.

The Israeli and Jewish blogospheres are, understandably, up in arms. This is one example – and this Israeli news site reports today (June 6th) that Israel’s ambassador in Washington has send a letter of protest to both Yahoo and Apple.

But the Arab, Muslim and/or Palestinian blogospheres? I can’t find a single word of comment.

To replay some of the numbers – Qatar is the world’s richest country by per-capita GDP, according to the IMF. It is a major oil producer as well as the world’s leading producer of liquefied natural gas. The Qatari economy is predicted to grow by a mammoth 16 percent this year, creating a budget surplus of more than $2.6 billion. (Compare that with Europe’s minuscule growth and cavernous budget deficits…) Qatar’s proven reserves indicate that oil production will continue at current levels for another 37 years.

And so on. This is not a country that has to worry about where the next meal is coming from.

Which makes me wonder why on earth Qatar has bought into the one-dimensional Gulf fashion for pouring resources into encouraging tourism. This is no Dubai: to start with, Doha lacks even Dubai’s evidence of cultural heritage – but Qatar also notably lacks other touristic assets, such as a tradition of trade beyond its home region or a diversity of landscapes.

I don’t mean to run the place down – that’s not the point – but I do wonder where the urge to self-identify as the world’s Next Big Destination comes from. Is government policy being fed by a PR agenda? Even aside from tourism, Qatar is pouring billions into bidding for the football World Cup in 2022 – except that the summer heat is so extreme that they are ploughing yet more money into developing open-air stadia capable of supporting fans and players through a football match in comfort. It’s like running down the up escalator.

(This, incidentally, in a country which is considerably smaller than Swaziland. At least people won’t have to travel far between games…)

Play to your strengths

Here’s a different vision for a small, flat, hot, homogeneous country with a conservative outlook and a global image problem (or should that be ‘image vacuum’), backed by virtually limitless money. Qatar, currently, is also the world’s leading per-capita emitter of carbon. $20 billion could buy an awful lot of good research into renewable energy. Such fabulous wealth, channelled in the right directions, might quickly gain a reputation for Qatar as the responsible face of big oil, irrevocably committed to hydrocarbons for historical reasons but equally committed to using the resultant wealth to fund the global development of renewables, for the benefit of humanity and the world. It could knock Abu Dhabi’s Masdar – itself a roughly $20 billion concern – into a cocked ghutrah.

Heck, they could start by throwing a measly one billion at renewables, and still have nineteen billion left over for luxury hotels.

On that note, how about this? If one billion might go to renewables, how about one billion to AIDS research, one billion to raise literacy levels in the developing world and – let’s think big – one billion to combat the kind of desperate poverty that leads Pakistani, Jordanian or Nigerian teenagers to imagine Islam as a violent, wronged, vengeful religion. Never mind chasing skyscrapers, big airports and fancy hotels – imagine the kind of profile and global name-recognition Qatar might get on the back of that. And there’d still be sixteen billion left over for hotels.

Instead, Qatar seems to want to turn itself into another over-resourced, over-developed place to stop over for a few days, on the way to somewhere less embarrassing.

Everyone – countries included – should play to their strengths. Tourism is not the only way.

It was a great presentation. Kate is very passionate about discovering and preserving these walking routes through the hills, spending thousands (from her own pocket) on waymarking and maintenance, applying herself for EU funding, dealing directly with the Turkish tourism authorities to engage them in developing these old roads – and, by her own account, making some headway in introducing the idea of long-distance walking on heritage trails to Turks themselves: though originally from the UK, she is now a Turkish citizen. She self-publishes her own guidebooks – they are the most authoritative sources on these routes – and leads regular tours.

One thing she happened to bark out in response to a question from the audience stopped me in my tracks. In 20 or 30 years, she said, when coastal tourism is threatened by climate change or finished altogether because of rising sea levels (or economic collapse), community-based walking and nature tourism will still be thriving. “Five-star tourism is a blip,” were her words.

What a thought. There’s so much money wrapped up in luxury tourism – both in the investment, but also in the wider industry which supports it – that it can be hard to see past it. When you’re in the middle of the whirlwind, either reporting on hotels and PR-driven tourism initiatives or aspiring to the kind of lifestyle where a stay in a luxury resort is something to be desired, it all feels so exciting, so now.

That’s the point, of course.

But Kate is right. ’Going on holiday’ – the idea of travel as mass relaxation, which we (in the West, at least) spend so much time, energy and money pursuing – was unknown a century ago.

And the notion of spending excessive amounts of money to play at a life of luxury within an opulent tourism complex under sunny skies far from home is even newer – perhaps less than 25 or 30 years old.

I don’t want to get too Alain de Botton-ish about this, but what Kate is doing – and many others involved in grassroots, sustainable tourism worldwide – mirrors how people have always ‘travelled’: with sensitivity, emotionally invested, on foot. For the entire history of humanity up until a few decades ago, travel was dangerous, unknowable and prohibitively expensive. It’s seductive to think that they way we do things now is the way things have always been – but of course that’s not true. Travel for pleasure is a very 20th-century thing; nothing says that it will last.

If fashions change and, some day, advancing technology renders five-star hotels obsolete or laughable (think of holiday camps, charabancs and “port out, starboard home”), walking will still be there.

It’s how we get about.

There is, for example, no UAE Ministry of Tourism. Instead, each individual emirate – Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Sharjah – handles its own promotion, often without regard to what their near-neighbours are doing.

Al Qassemi draws comparison with the spectacularly successful ‘Incredible India‘ and ‘Malaysia: Truly Asia‘ campaigns, within which individual regions are free to market themselves, but always under the banner of the global tagline.

This raises interesting questions. The US is another federal country without a national tourism promotion strategy. The big names, such as Florida, New York and California, have massive tourism budgets, and therefore dominate the inbound industry – whereas the likes of Nebraska, Idaho and Oklahoma don’t, and so often miss out. Would a US Tourism Office even out the numbers and spread tourism more widely – or is it just that more people find California interesting than Oklahoma? Tough call.

In the UAE, though, it’s pretty clear to me that there is huge benefit to be gained from devising a promotional brand which encompasses the whole country. Sharjah, Fujairah and – as I’ve blogged previously – Ras Al-Khaimah have a huge amount to offer in terms of landscapes, culture and diversity that could significantly boost the rather monolithic concept of tourism currently put forward by Dubai and Abu Dhabi. There’s no logical reason why they should be denied a slice of that pie.

But the most interesting line in Al Qassemi’s piece is this: “Frankly, I have no doubt that if Emiratis were responsible for the UAE’s tourism campaigns we see on television, the name of the country would have appeared.”

Al Qassemi has a track record of saying the unsayable – his piece from 2008 “Welcome back our long-gone neighbours“, to name just one, knocked me (and lots of people I know) sideways – and this fits that bill perfectly. It’s hard to gainsay it.

To English ears, the UAE is the country with perhaps the world’s most unwieldy name, as well as its least memorable acronym: you can imagine teams of expat marketing and PR consultants, brought in to advise Dubai and Abu Dhabi on tourism strategy, tutting and shaking their heads and then saying ‘let’s just forget about the whole UAE thing, eh?’.

Those chickens have come home to roost, with a vengeance. The name Dubai – though not quite a laughing-stock – has lost much of its shine… and, without a national identity to back it up, there is no safety-net. Hence Sheikh Mohammed’s ‘Vision 2021‘ idea to develop a unified identity for the whole country.

Yet to Emiratis, of course, their nationality is a key determinant of identity, along with family, tribe and a host of others – much like the multiple layers of identity in apparently unified Western countries (I’m thinking, in the UK, not just of English/Scottish/Welsh identity, but northern/southern, urban/rural, middle/working class, and so on). It seems those expat consultants conveniently forgot about that.

When it comes to tourism promotion, local knowledge and local perspectives matter. Can you imagine the UK bringing in a team of, say, Korean media specialists to advise on 2012 Olympics promotion? Not a chance: marketing and PR to aid specific markets can help, but the overall strategy would always be home-grown.

So should it be in the Emirates. After a chaotic generation of transition, which has left the country wildly unbalanced in terms of economy, politics, culture and demography, it’s time to do some nation-building. That means easing citizenship laws, building railways and working out what it really means to be Emirati. Interesting years ahead.

Then it seemed like the print world was losing impetus, and online was where things were happening. So I got a blog.

Now, in what I think might be a world first (please tell me if it isn’t!), a print magazine has devoted a page to reproducing my blog in print form. Gulf Life, the inflight magazine of Bahrain-based Gulf Air, published in London by Ink and distributed around the world, has a track record of innovation, in both design and content. They contacted me recently and said they were interested in “reversing the flow” of print to online, and wanted to launch a regular column showcasing blogs of Middle East interest in the magazine. Was I interested?

So now I blog about something, then a month later it appears on the blog page of a print magazine – and now here I am, blogging about it… Feels a bit, well, incestuous.

A really interesting development. It’s certainly a fantastic opportunity for me – thank you, Gulf Life – and an unusual way to monetize my blog. But it also raises an interesting side-question: what’s the difference between a blog and a column?

I’ll spare you the personal details, but one of the things she mentioned was her contribution to Al Mashriq. That was like tying two long-forgotten friends together into one memory. Al Mashriq was one of the first websites I ever explored, way back in 1996 when I started to work out what on earth anyone was supposed to actually do with the internet.

Maghreb is a familiar term in English, used to describe the countries of North Africa; it comes from the Arabic word gharb, meaning west (i.e. of Cairo). Its equivalent, referring to the countries of the Levant – Mashriq, from sharq, meaning east – is much less familiar… not helped by the fact that the more common term in Arabic – Bilad Ash-Sham, or “Lands of the North” (i.e. from Arabia) – mixes up the compass points.

The Al Mashriq site was started by Norwegian academic Børre Ludvigsen in 1994 as a one-stop compendium of cultural material relating to the Levant (Ludvigsen grew up in Lebanon in the 1960s). Back in the day it was unsurpassed: getting any kind of online information out of the Middle East was virtually impossible, and for the best part of a decade Al Mashriq was one of my regular haunts.

However it was a mammoth undertaking, and the devil was in the updating. There’s not been much of that – the About page proudly boasts that the site hosts 35,000 documents “at the present (March 2000)” – and as a source of up-to-date cultural developments in the region, Al Mashriq has long since been overtaken (not least by the superb site Al-Bab, run by Guardian journalist Brian Whitaker).

But going back to it now, and exploring pages (and whole areas of the site) that haven’t been touched in more than a decade, is fascinating. It’s like stumbling across a dusty, old secondhand bookshop crammed with out-of-print gems. Earnestly uploaded information, lots of it hopelessly outdated, has a value of its own simply through having survived unscathed.

A 1973 tourist pamphlet of Jerash, “bought at Antoine’s bookshop, Rue Hamra, Beirut, in 1995″, has been digitized and uploaded, complete with B&W photos. Fifteen years ago, before Wikipedia, Flickr and VisitJordan.com, that was a genuinely useful resource… and, like a musty Baedeker, it still is.

Several articles from Saudi Aramco World magazine from the 1990s, each presumably typed in painstakingly by hand and uploaded, would have been rare and useful source reading. Now, the magazine has its own free online archive going back fifty years.

A blurry, indistinct satellite image of central Cairo was something to coo over, in the days before Google Earth. And it needed the warning that the full version was 300K in size – that must have necessitated a long wait for the download, back in 1994…

And so on. Loads of links are broken (though a surprising number still work) and lots of material is out of date – but there is still a vast amount of fascinating and useful stuff to browse through, much of which is not date-sensitive. And, occasionally, there is evidence of recent updating. Maps and images of the 2006 war between Lebanon and Israel; recent socio-economic reports on Palestinian refugees in Lebanon – and a section on the now-defunct Lebanese State Railway Company, researched and written in 2008-09 with the help of a certain Toufoul Abou-Hodeib.

Rediscovering old friends is such a joy.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)