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.

Pictured right is Khasab Fort, a small, 17th-century Portuguese-built castle that sits on the waterfront at Khasab, a tiny Omani town overlooking the Strait of Hormuz at the head of the Gulf.

Last month Khasab Fort won the International Award at the 2010 Museums & Heritage Awards for Excellence at a ceremony in London, beating off competition from the Manchester United Experience, the Heineken factory tour and a Gallo-Roman Museum in Belgium. Well done, Khasab.

I’m only mentioning it because it surprised me, in these days of PR-driven communication agendas, that the Omani tourism people didn’t send out a press release trumpeting the victory. Not a peep, in fact. I only found about it because of one line at the bottom of a press release about something else entirely.

Was it – to adopt Twitter-speak – a “PR fail”? Possibly (even, let’s face it, probably), but since I’m a charitable soul it crossed my mind that it might be a case of refreshing modesty.

Khasab is way off most visitors’ beaten track – it’s a flight or a heck of a long drive from the Omani capital Muscat, and is in fact closer to Dubai (though still a three-hour drive from there). It’s small, rocky and remote – not far, in fact, from the islet where 19th-century British sailors went “round the bend” from the heat, aridity and isolation.

Frankly, the Omani tourism authorities have got bigger fish to fry than Khasab, in the shape of their Now Is The Time! campaign, and projections which place Oman as the world’s third-fastest growing tourism market this year.

Maybe they’re just, well, playing it cool, not drawing attention to an out-of-the-way provincial heritage museum because, well, nobody goes to Khasab for the fort – they go for the fjords, the dolphins, the dhow trips.

Maybe.

Nah. PR fail.

UPDATE: As the comments on this story show, I have an apology to make – far from a PR fail, this shows just how out of touch I really am. It seems that releases went out (but I missed them) and the story was headline news in Oman (but I missed it). Apologies to all concerned for my mistake; all unfounded accusations are withdrawn and no inference should be made, other than to the author’s competence.

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.

Ryanair cabin

US airline Spirit Airlines has announced it will charge passengers who want to carry bags onto its aircraft that won’t fit under the seat in front $45 for use of the overhead bins ($30 if they pay in advance).

Irish airline Ryanair has announced that it is pressing ahead with its plan to remove two of the three onboard toilets on its planes serving routes of less than one hour, install six extra seats in their place, and develop coin-operated access to the remaining toilet: passengers who want to use it during the flight will have to pay either £1 or €1 to get access.

One of these is good business. The other is plain gouging. Which is which?

Disrepute

There seems little justification for Spirit’s charge. How can it be that the same bag – which, incidentally, remains completely untouched at all times by either Spirit staff or baggage handlers on the ground: this is not about passing on hidden costs – can command a $45 fee if it’s placed in the overhead bin rather than under the seat? Spirit is not providing a service by having the bins in place: they are providing precisely nothing more than already exists on board.

Is it about weight? No: a small bag that fits under the seats could be filled with gold bars, while a big, puffy, half-empty sports bag would have to go in the overhead bin, incurring that $45 charge.

This is simply about thinking up ways to penalise people for flying with anything other than the clothes they stand up in and – effectively – a briefcase or personal handbag. Why would they want to do that? Search me.

I’d respect them more – and, frankly, this would make more business sense too – if they ripped out all the overhead bins on their aircraft, thereby saving heaven knows how much weight onboard, and then refused to pass on the savings in fuel to their customers. That would be reprehensible, but, in the end, tolerable.

But to create a division between different classes of carry-on bags? This has been poorly thought-through, and merely brings them – and the aviation industry – into disrepute.

Good business

By contrast, Ryanair has got it right. Toilets on board planes – especially ones that are doing short-hops of under one hour – are not a right. They are a service to the customer. They cost money to install and maintain, they take up valuable on-board real estate (the sale of which is the only means for the airline to run its business) and, I’d bet, on short flights like these, they go unused 99% of the time.

Think of Ryanair like a bus company: you don’t get a toilet on board a one-hour bus ride across London. Why should you?

There’s been a lot of hot air about how Ryanair charges excessive prices for onboard snacks and drinks. Well fine: don’t buy them! It’s not obligatory to sit there stuffing your face and swigging gin and tonics! You think £2, or £5, is too much for a cup of tea? Don’t buy it. Don’t buy the scratchcards, ignore the advertising, bring your own snacks – it’s easy.

In order to benefit from what are – let’s face it – fares that everybody thought a few years back were unsustainably low (that myth’s been put to bed, hasn’t it?), treat short-hop air travel like short-hop ground travel. Go to the loo before you leave, get on, sit there like you would on a bus, then get off again. What’s not to like?

This is the first time I’ve had a biometric passport, i.e. one that includes my personal data encoded on a chip embedded into the passport. I filled out the form, paid £4 for a set of four photos from a machine (Four quid! Someone’s having a laugh…) and took it to the nice lady at the Chipping Norton post office.

She pushed the photos back. “You have to take your glasses off.” But I can’t see without them, I said – and anyway I never take them off except when I’m asleep. Doesn’t matter: she was adamant the passport office wouldn’t accept them.

“It’s not about what you look like anymore,” she said. “It’s about how your eyes line up with your nose, and all the rest of it. Biometrics.”

So my new passport shows this bare-eyed stranger staring back at me. Perfectly fine for passing through high-tech border controls where they swipe your passport through a machine-reader, scan the chip and barely glance at your face.

But what about the other 95% of border controls around the world, where the only technology is a knackered old PC (if you’re lucky) and/or a dog-eared ledger for writing down names and passport numbers? They’re going to look at the photo, look at me, look at the photo again – and, well, guess what I’m going to be asked several times a year for the next decade?

“Please take off your glasses.”

Sigh.

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?

For a modest, often-overlooked country in a region of big headlines, such a very public commendation is no small thing. And for Jordan in particular, whose film industry – such as it is – represents a minuscule fraction of the national economy right now, that one sentence could make a big difference.

A couple of years ago, I was lucky enough to be invited on set during filming for Captain Abu Raed, the first full-length feature film to come out of Jordan in more than fifty years, directed by Amin Matalqa. I wrote about it extensively – here is one article which appeared at the time – and I remember that the buzz which built up in Amman around the movie’s premiere and its subsequent success was like nothing I’d been a (tiny) part of before. Captain Abu Raed won numerous awards, including at the Sundance Film Festival, and it ended up as Jordan’s first-ever entry for the Oscars – even though it didn’t make it onto the shortlist that year…

What it did do – aside from its artistic achievement – was broadcast the fact that Jordan is a safe, efficient place to shoot a movie. The Hurt Locker is following in a line of Hollywood films, from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade to Brian De Palma’s Redacted – via The Mummy Returns and Transformers – that were shot in Jordan… not forgetting David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia.

Movie-shoots mean prosperity: aside from the publicity and the star names, dozens or hundreds of people on the crew must be fed and accommodated during the (often weeks-long) shoot, transport is needed, local fixers are needed – and then there are many opportunities for filmmakers and technicians to be taken on locally.

Movie-shoots also generate tourism. When fighting meant that Bollywood directors could no longer shoot song-and-dance scenes in the Kashmir mountains, they turned to the Alps. Years of unexpected growth in the market for Indian tourism to Switzerland followed. The country now offers specialist film tours for Indian tourists.

In addition, foreign shoots give a huge boost to Jordan’s own, tiny film industry, which is mostly – for lack of resources, rather than creativity – centred around shorts. Matalqa and Mahmoud Al Massad, director of Recycle (2007), are still making movies, and this year sees the first students graduating from the Aqaba-based Red Sea School of Cinematic Arts (RSICA), an international film school – the first in the Middle East.

In front of the world’s media, Bigelow could have said anything and thanked anyone in her acceptance speech, or even seized the headlines by mentioning the Iraq war. She chose instead to dedicate her award to the people of Jordan. Good for her – and good for Jordan.

In the comments, Debbie Ferm of Traveldither.com wrote, “Like all web copy, travel writing will need to be more scannable… almost like copywriting.” What a pity if she’s right!

What interests me are people and places. I’m a writer. I care about the travel industry only to the extent of how it impacts on the stories I want to tell. The stuff I’m proud to write – which, not coincidentally, matches the stuff I like to read – is not round-ups or hotel reviews or sponsored puffs. That’s for paying the bills. When I’m a doddery old grandpa, few people may care about my stories of travel, but absolutely nobody will give a monkeys about my opinion of the travel industry in the long-forgotten 2010s.

Newspapers have painted themselves into a corner. By abandoning the journalistic model of paying skilled writers to report on people and places, they turned themselves into mouthpieces for the travel industry, which has funded the creation of travel ‘content’ for years now.

That model is now breaking down, as the travel industry withdraws its funding and cuts back on print advertising. This has left traditional media high and dry: by their parsimony and, some might say, corruption in years gone by, they’ve killed the goose.

Online travel writing is in a different place. Divisions and micro-definitions get boring, but perhaps one is justified here: travel journalism, i.e. round-ups, site reports, reviews, listings, investigations, industry analysis, is different from travel writing, i.e. stories of people and places, features, profiles, cultural insight, long-form creativity.

Both are valid. Thanks to the old media models, the former dominates. It shouldn’t.

And, online, it needn’t. Long-form feature writing about travel matters. It can do things that no other kind of writing can do, and can make connections that might otherwise never be made. Old media nonetheless sold it down the river.

If we accept Debbie’s notion of online travel writing as glorified holiday-brochure copywriting, SEO’d to within an inch of its life, the same thing will happen again.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.