For years, two aspects of air travel from the UK to Jordan have hamstrung tourism growth. One has been unsociable flight times, which forced British tourists to effectively ‘lose’ two days either side of their trip on late-night arrivals and early-morning departures. The other has been the limited or non-existent access to airports other than Amman.

Aside from the unveiling of the shiny new terminal at Amman airport (warning: autostart video) – a success, from what I’ve read – there have been interesting developments on both fronts.

Cheapest option

First, the cheapest option from the UK to Jordan is still EasyJet from Gatwick to Amman. At the moment they go three times a week (Tues, Thurs & Sun), departing Gatwick’s North Terminal (*eyeroll*) 12.50pm lunchtime, arriving Amman 8pm. The turnaround is quick, departing Amman 8.45pm, landing back in Gatwick just after midnight.

In late-Oct 2013 that drops to two flights a week: Sundays roughly on the above model of lunchtime departure/evening return, and Thursdays departing LGW 9.15am, arriving AMM 4.25pm, then departing AMM 5.10pm to land back in Gatwick 8.50pm.

Prices remain low. On a test booking today, six months in advance, I could get a week’s return in late November/early December 2013 for a pretty unbeatable £149.98 (hand-baggage only, pay by debit card) – well under half the price of any other option, and one-third the fare of the nonstop legacy carriers.

Mornings, afternoons & overnight

Over at Heathrow, Jordan’s national carrier – what does that even mean? – Royal Jordanian is sticking to its time-honoured schedule, which is designed principally to serve connecting traffic to/from the US and Asia rather than to suit point-to-point travellers.

Their once-daily flights depart Heathrow Terminal 3 around 5pm, landing in Amman just after midnight – which, if you add in airport formalities, a forty-minute drive into the city and hotel check-in, means your head won’t realistically hit the pillow until 2am. That’s Day 1 of your holiday used up on the flight, and Day 2 undermined by tiredness. RJ’s return flights leave Amman around midday – which means your last day in Jordan involves an early breakfast and the airport highway – to bring you back to Heathrow around 3.30pm.

At British Airways, by contrast, schedules to Amman have been completely revamped, and bumped up to 11 flights a week. Daily flights from Heathrow Terminal 1 (until T1 is demolished, perhaps in 2014) depart around 9am, landing in Amman at 4pm, then turn round to depart AMM 5.30pm, landing back at Heathrow just before 9pm.

If you can handle that 7am check-in time, that means Day 1 of your holiday would finish up rather nicely, with a spot of sightseeing, a sunset drink and dinner. At the end of your trip you could wake up anywhere in Jordan (city, desert, seaside, mountains), have a generous half-day out and about, and still get to the airport in time to check in. From Petra, say, it’s only 200km to the airport, driveable in a bit over 2 hours.

And BA is also throwing an intriguing new option into the mix – four days a week (Mon, Wed, Fri & Sat) it now has an overnight flight to Amman. Until October 2013, it departs Heathrow 10.20pm, arriving Amman 5.25am; after October, times change slightly. It’s short – realistically, you’ll only get at most a gritty-eyed four hours’ sleep in your seat – but it lets you hit the ground running in Jordan. The return is a 9am departure (Tue, Thu, Sat & Sun), landing at Heathrow just after midday.

Return fares on either BA or RJ start around £450. Why so high? Mumble mumble, market forces, mumble mumble, difficult times, mumble mumble, nobody really knows.

If you’re collecting miles, they’re both in the oneworld alliance.

One-stop options: hello Aqaba

There are lots of options for one-stop flights on a welter of airlines out of most UK airports – Lufthansa via Frankfurt, Air France via Paris and loads more. One to note is Turkish Airlines. They’re often the cheapest of the full-service carriers – but are part of the Star Alliance partnership and have a good reputation.

As well as Amman, they’ve also recently started flying into Aqaba, Jordan’s southernmost city on the Red Sea beaches. This opens up previously elusive open-jaw possibilities (bizarrely, none of Royal Jordanian’s domestic shuttles Amman-Aqaba is timed to coincide with the arrival of their Heathrow flight).

And Turkish fly out of Heathrow, Birmingham, Manchester and Edinburgh, opening up travel for non-London types.

The only problem? Utterly mad flight times.

They fly twice daily Istanbul-Amman, departing at either 8.20pm (arrives 11.15pm) or a cheery 2.20am (arrives 5.15am).

So if you’re starting from Birmingham or Manchester, you’ll depart at 4pm, have four hours layover in Istanbul airport (10pm-2am) and then about two and a half hours in the air to “sleep” before landing in Amman in the pre-dawn gloom. Fresh as a daisy.

The godawful returns depart Amman at 2.40am (arrives Istanbul 5.35am), or 7am (arrives 10am).

Turkish’s Aqaba flights (3 weekly: Wed, Fri & Sun) are even nuttier. Depart Istanbul 12.30am, arrive Aqaba 3am, with the return departing Aqaba 4am, arriving Istanbul 6.30am. Enjoy weaving THAT into your holiday plans.

But at least they exist. As I’ve written elsewhere, Aqaba airport is perhaps Jordan’s single most under-used national asset. Bar a sprinkling of seasonal Scandinavian or east European charter flights, it is a full-size international airport in the middle of the country’s premier tourist region – within easy reach of Petra, Wadi Rum and the Red Sea beaches – standing effectively empty. One nonstop flight a week from a handful of key European hubs could inject new vigour into Jordanian tourism, cutting out the need to loop back overland to Amman, opening up new tours, new ways of visiting, new markets. It’s an investment opportunity. It’s a vehicle for growth.

Oh never mind. Nobody listens to me :-)

which is a five-storey behemoth in white, 72m long and towering almost 12m high, lined (as it was) with pasty, grey-haired tourists pointing cameras at them, it was a sight to behold. I watched him watching:

And they watched me watching them watching me:

But when it got to all of them watching all of us watching them, I wasn’t sure who was really watching who:

I think we all thought it was the other lot who were really worth watching.

She stopped work to watch:

They’d already stopped:

(A little bit of audio here.)

And I’m not sure this lot had even started:

Sometimes, people just refused to be interested.

Other times, it was the best thing that had happened all day – heck, all WEEK!

These guys in Assyut couldn’t get enough pictures of our boatload of fat, old Europeans taking pictures of them. “Check out this one!”

“No seriously, welcome to Egypt!” (“Oh God, this is so embarrassing…”)

“Oh yeah, forgot, cameras, gotta strike a pose. There.”

Or, er, not.

And after the Assiut boys had their fun, it was the Assiut girls’ turn.

I love this one:

These tiny kids already knew they should do the waving at tourists thing.

But these two definitely weren’t about to do THAT. They’d seen MUCH bigger ships LOADS of times before, anyway.

Oh, hi!

But it’s only a ship. Definitely no need to get too excited.

Unless you’re a camel, that is.

There’s moody…

…and then there’s so over-excited your pants are showing:

Then again, not everyone bothers with pants.

(Trust me, you don’t want to see the hi-res original of that.)

More from Egypt to follow…

That’s it. Go ahead and book your holiday. You’ll have a fabulous time. Thanks for reading.

Oh, you want more?

For this particular trip I didn’t go to Alex or the Delta, I didn’t go to Sinai & the Red Sea resorts, and I didn’t go to the Western Desert. That’s a chunk of Egypt missing. But I did spend time in Cairo, Luxor and Aswan, I did visit key cities and archaeological sites in Middle Egypt, and I did talk to a few people. Here’s my take on things.

Tourism to Egypt is way down. In 2010, 15 million tourists visited. In 2011 that was down to 10 million. Then 11 million in 2012.

But in my book 11 million people is a pretty sizeable vote of tourist confidence – in terms of sheer numbers, it’s more than Morocco gets, more than South Africa, and far more than Argentina, India or Japan. But there’s a political transition under way in Egypt. The country is emerging after decades of dictatorship. Vested interests are jockeying for position. That means Egypt is in the news quite a bit. Work with that. Understand it. Don’t wait for things to go back to normal. There is no more ‘normal’.

And lack of political stability doesn’t necessarily mean lack of tourist safety. Quite the opposite. Police are extra-vigilant now around tourists. The local tourism industry knows it can’t afford to be even a tiny bit complacent. Nobody is taking any chances. Egypt, in some ways, is safer now for tourists than it was before 2011.

Package tours – a worry-free holiday

Book a package tour through a reputable (bonded) company – with flights, transfers, accommodation and excursions included – and you’ll be as safe as safe can be. Even if your tour operator at home is hazy about what’s happening on the ground, their Egyptian agents will know the score at every point, adjusting and refining itineraries to match current conditions.

If you’re on the Red Sea, everything will be normal in and around your resort. If you’re in the south, all of Luxor and Aswan are safe for tourists (other than desperate vendors and guides being extra-specially pushy). If you’re in Cairo, you’ll likely be placed in a hotel away from the downtown area – probably out near the Pyramids, which is absolutely fine. If you make any excursions to sites, it will most likely be by private bus, possibly in convoy with other buses and/or with police escort.

All in all, it’s a worry-free holiday.

Personally, I don’t like package tours. But if you want to see the sights and cover decent ground, a package tour is probably the best way to visit Egypt at the moment.

If you’re travelling independently, you need to have your head screwed on and take slightly more care.

Independent travellers – Tahrir Square in detail

Most guidebooks start their Cairo city account with Tahrir Square. But times have changed. Travel writers would do better to pick another starting point. Currently (May 2013) Tahrir has become distinctly dodgy. Aside from the Egyptian Museum – best reached by taxi – I can’t come up with a compelling reason for tourists to go to Tahrir Square at all just now. Half the square is cordoned off as a construction site. The ex-Nile Hilton – now Ritz-Carlton – has been closed for years. The shops and cafes along the square’s eastern frontage are distinctly ordinary – and, with the square’s new notoriety, are now fringed by vendors and other boisterous characters keen to latch onto foreign gawpers. There’s fast food – KFC, Hardees, Pizza Hut – but not much else.

I’m no shrinking violet, and I’m also not a government official obligated to promote maximum caution. I’m just a British outsider who’s lived, worked and played in Cairo, and been round the Middle East circuit a few times over the last 20 years to boot. And my advice is to think very hard before going to Tahrir Square.

If you want to go, go in daytime – and don’t hang about. If this is your first time in Cairo, I suggest you skip Tahrir.

Either way, I certainly wouldn’t go to Tahrir after dark, or anytime on Fridays.

(Here comes the scary bit.) Tahrir is where protests start, it’s where mobs gather, and it’s where police have laid walls of concrete blocks across several side-streets in order to cut off exit routes and kettle people inside the square (photo and map). And in case you weren’t aware, not all protests these days are noble demands from righteous citizens for democracy. They’re just as likely to comprise several hundred pumped-up young men, armed with knives, guns, molotovs and/or other makeshift weapons, setting fires in the street and facing off against the police for no clear reason. This exasperates ordinary people and committed activists alike. Law and order aren’t totally breaking down, but economic pressures are intense and crime is on the rise (from, it must be said, a very low starting-point). Sexual assaults on women – by which I mean forcible seizure and/or abduction, violent bodily attacks, mass public rape – are a growing feature of the ‘protests’ in Tahrir.

Most of the time, of course, daily life is tension-free. You might not see or even sense anything untoward. These tourists didn’t, for instance. I’m pleased for them.

Be aware that the area around Tahrir – from 6th October Bridge in the north to the British Embassy in the south – is dodgier than the square itself. The side-streets behind the Mogamma building – particularly around Simon Bolivar Square – are notoriously unsafe after dark (this is where Guardian correspondent Jack Shenker was mugged earlier this month, and also where mobs smashed their way into the InterContinental Hotel Semiramis). Mohammed Mahmoud Street – now blocked by a concrete wall – has seen many recent protests. If tear gas is being fired, the ventilation system for Tahrir Square’s metro station (named Sadat) has been known to suck the gas underground into the metro.

If you’re visiting the Garden City district, or staying in one of the hotels there (Kempinski, Four Seasons, Grand Hyatt or others), be aware that Qasr Al Aini Street is blocked at the Tahrir Square end: the only access is along the Corniche. But the Corniche tunnel exit by the Qasr Al Nil Bridge (directly beside the Semiramis) is one of Tahrir’s flashpoints, where crowds gather: if you’re driving back to Garden City after dark you’d do better to make a large circle around the area to approach it from the south instead.

Independent travellers – around Cairo

But Tahrir is a tiny part of a giant city. It gets too much attention. This blog post, for instance. Elsewhere, normality reigns.

Cairo seemed fine to me this time, no scarier than any other big city and less scary than many. (The Financial Times agrees!) I walked a lot – around the Coptic churches near Mar Girgis metro, across downtown from Tahrir to Ataba, all the way through Islamic Cairo on Muski and Al Azhar to El Hussein, into the backstreets off Al Moaz, outside the walls past Bab Al Futuh, etc etc – and everything felt crazily normal to me.

I’m pretty naive, though – and people tell me I also blend in fairly well as a local. And I’m male. All of which slants my experience.

But I think visitors would do well to ditch the idea that Tahrir is some kind of Times Square/Piccadilly Circus/Place de la Concorde. Stay elsewhere. Stay in Zamalek. Stay in Dokki. Cairo is big enough that every district is like its own city centre.

The best bit of advice I ever heard for walking in Cairo? Carry your stuff (camera, water, book etc) in an ordinary black plastic bag, the kind the locals carry shopping in. Nothing says ‘foreigner’ more than a daypack. A plastic bag – along with a button shirt, long trousers and a bit of facial swarthiness – has let me amble unremarked into more back alleys than I can remember.

[UPDATE: Travel writer Zora O'Neill tweets to tell me the plastic bag advice was hers - she put it in the LP Egypt guide in 2007, she says. Credit to Zora. And apologies too.]

Independent travellers – around Egypt

As for the rest of Egypt, there are probably only two areas of concern for independent travellers. One is the Sinai. The south Sinai coast, from Sharm to Taba, seems to be fine – but any excursions inland (including to St Catherine’s) seem significantly riskier just now. One Egyptian travel agent I talked to said he’d recently refused to book transport from Sharm to St Catherine’s for a client – “I don’t want the responsibility,” he told me.

Would I travel overland between Cairo and Sinai just now? I’m not sure. I’d take advice before deciding. I might fly.

The whole of northern Sinai is off-limits to tourists.

Middle Egypt – effectively, the Nile between Cairo and Luxor – is just opening up again to tourism. Visiting these places (Beni Suef, Minya, Assyut, Sohag) was never easy. For a time in the 90s and 00s, during an Islamist insurgency, tourists were barred altogether. Even if it’s possible to travel there independently now, from what I’ve been told you’ll very likely be assigned a police minder for the duration of your stay, both inside the cities and if you choose to head out to any archaeological sites in the countryside. I saw no other tourists when I walked in these places last month.

Elsewhere, Luxor and all points south are suffering badly from the lack of tourism just now. Group bookings are way down – which means independent travellers can reckon on quieter excursions and more rewarding encounters. Visit, and you’ll probably be welcomed like a long-lost relative. Who’s come to buy things. Lots of things.

Since I read that, I’ve also been asking around, and have come up with the following, from a source I trust – an archaeological expert who wants to remain anonymous.

This person says the Wadi Abu Jamil area was – as Battah suggested – Beirut’s hippodrome in Roman times. It is currently being excavated by Hans Curvers, a Dutch archaeological consultant. Curvers has published papers on Beirut’s hippodrome here, and was interviewed by the Beirut Daily Star in 2011 on exactly this subject.

My source continues that the site photographed by Battah is closed off because work is currently being done there by a Marburg University team led by Professor Winfried Held. There’s a ceramics expert examining material from what is thought may be a theatre (perhaps predating the Roman era), alongside an architect, a photographer and a draftsperson. It is described as a “post-excavation research deal”, initially running for three years, perhaps to be extended thereafter. There is, I’m told, very little of the hippodrome architecture left, hence the requirement for a multi-specialist team to help the excavator figure it out. “Very sensible,” my source remarks.

A person closely connected with historical and archaeological research in Lebanon (sorry about all this anonymity) tells me: “We should be pleased that the site is now well-guarded. The original site in 1994 was used as a public toilet until Solidere put a fence around the entire Beirut Souks site. All has certainly not been destroyed by the building companies, and we should be wary of false bad publicity.”

I’m also told that Solidere has fifty large-scale, multilingual public noticeboards, printed (somehow?) on stone, ready to go up in the BCD explaining the history and archaeology of downtown Beirut.

It’s perhaps understandable that historians and archaeologists with an interest in Beirut resist criticism of Solidere – after all, work, funding and, perhaps, career prospects depend on maintaining good relations with the company. It’s also regrettably clear why nobody wants to put their name to any remarks, even positive ones.

Not everything Solidere does is bad.

But then again, I’d argue Beirut is clearly worse off for Solidere and what it has done over the last 20 years. A previous post by Battah, critical of Solidere, sparked much debate about the company. Prominent blogger Mustapha Hamoui gave this trenchant response, unnecessarily shielding, it seems to me, an opaque, grossly over-resourced, excessively powerful, profit-driven entity that has emasculated the BCD, simply because it’s not the only thing that’s bad about Beirut. True, it’s not. But, let’s face it, Solidere is a mighty big thing that’s mightily bad.

That said, though, with the impossibility of rooting the company out, I’d rather that it fenced off areas of historical interest to allow the archaeologists to work than, as has happened far too much already in Beirut, blithely bulldozes them for redevelopment.

The problem comes with, in Lama Bashour’s words, “this new photo fascism in Lebanon, where anyone with half an ounce of power orders you to stop taking photographs in public spaces.” That, perhaps, is the most telling takeaway from Habib Battah’s original, fascinating post.

But that’s a disease not confined to Lebanon…

[NOTE: All of this applies only to holders of "Western" passports who are exempt from applying for Israeli tourist visas (full list here). Citizens of other countries must apply, pay a fee and sometimes wait for official clearance. However, Israel is known to discriminate against Western tourists of Arab or Muslim origin at its points of entry, and also severely restricts the movement of Palestinians into and out of the West Bank and Gaza – they cannot use Tel Aviv airport, for instance. Hold that in mind as you read on...]

The problem:

I explain the original problem in detail here.

In a nutshell, many Arab and Muslim countries refuse entry to people who show evidence of a visit to Israel. “Evidence” mostly means Israeli passport stamps, but it can also mean Egyptian or Jordanian stamps from the crossing-points into/out of Israel.

The ban means that, apart from Egypt, Jordan and Morocco – who don’t care – if your travels include almost any other country in the region you either have to construct a touring itinerary so you visit Israel last, or you have to do a complicated (and expensive) bit of backtracking through a certain border post where, thanks to a piece of bureaucratic doublethink, your passport usually remains free of stamps.

For years (decades!) Western travellers have meekly asked Israeli immigration officials not to stamp their passport, but – as has happened to me – officials have been known to cheerfully “forget” and bang a stamp in anyway. And then shrug. For me that’s not such a big deal. For someone, say, living in Dubai, such a stamp could mean separation from family, property and livelihood, and massive added expense and worry in obtaining a new passport and reconfirming immigration status.

The solution?

I was just in Israel again – entering and leaving through Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport. I asked the official not to stamp my passport, but this time he told me there’s been a new policy in the last “couple of months” and they’ve stopped stamping passports altogether. Instead he quickly scanned my passport and issued me with this:

It’s the usual B2 tourist visa, but on an electronically printed slip of paper, which includes my name, nationality, photo (copied from my passport photo), date and so on. My thumb conceals a serial reference number and my passport number, and I’ve obscured the barcode. You’ll spot that Arabic, one of Israel’s official languages, is noticeably missing here.

This is the back of the slip:

There was no rubber-stamping at all. I kept the slip in my passport, and when I left the country the passport official returned it to me, again without stamping (she date-stamped my airline boarding card, that was all).

Is this a universal policy, or only at Ben Gurion airport? I don’t know, and I’ve not been able to source any official comment either way. The last time I passed through Israeli immigration was in December 2012, when I crossed the northern Jordan River bridge. Back then they were stamping – are they still doing so? Maybe someone could add a comment below to tell me.

And what happens if you are granted entry on a B2 visa, but with restrictions – excluded from PA areas, or restricted to PA only, or on a limited time validity (less than the standard 3 months)? Do they stamp then, or issue a printed slip? I don’t know.

If this turns out to be a universal policy, applied at every entry point, to every “Western” (i.e. visa-exempt) tourist, it opens up (for those people at least) the possibility of guaranteed free movement around the Middle East. You still need to be careful not to pick up tell-tale Egyptian and Jordanian exit/entry stamps, but if you know your passport will definitely remain clear of Israeli stamps, it’s one less thing to worry about on a complicated border-hopping tour through the region.

If anyone can shed more light, please feel free to add a comment.

UPDATE: It seems I was right, and there has been a policy change. One of the most experienced local travel companies, operating cross-border in Jordan and Palestine for many decades, has contacted me to point out a newly revised section on the website of one of their subsidiary firms. Their information corroborates my original post.

This can only be good. Anything that draws visitors off Jordan’s far-too-beaten tourist track is to be welcomed.

And Salt is lovely – historic, attractive, easygoing, almost completely untouristed. I introduce it here. You can find that gorgeous Ottoman architecture – balconies, pointed arches, stained glass, honeyed limestone – all over Palestine, Lebanon and Syria, but it’s a rarity in Jordan, which historically was a rural backwater, lacking urban sophistication – or, in truth, cities of any kind.

Indeed, Salt is just about the only place in Jordan to hold any sort of urban history extending back beyond the middle of last century. As such it has huge potential in tourism, but also in domestically-focused heritage – and so has had money lavished on it over the last few years from both the Japanese government (PDF from 2011) and the US government (article from 2011). That Japanese involvement is continuing: this (PDF Oct 2012) talks about an ongoing three-year project developing sustainable tourism in Salt.

Like I said, all good. Salt deserves a slice of the pie. I hope more Jordanians, as well as tourists, spend time in the place, walking its alleys, admiring its views, hearing its bells, climbing its hills, soaking up the atmosphere of its fine old Hammam Street souk. Just a little bit Jerusalem. A little bit.

As for the new hotel itself, named Saltos, I haven’t seen it. Check their Facebook and Twitter. But knowing the location – and reading that it has 23 rooms and “limited food and beverage offerings” – my guess is it’s a modest affair.

Modest is good. Jordan needs luxury tourism like a hole in the head.

And in case you want a map, they’ve helpfully tweeted one of the city and one of their location. Go.

Rough Guides (in fact, the amazing Martin Dunford; how many careers have you launched, Martin?) commissioned me to write the first edition back in 1997. I spent three months in Amman that summer – and then moved to Jordan shortly afterwards. The first edition came out the following year, then another in 2002, then 2006, then 2009. Now 2013.

It’s been a constant 15-year process of updating and refining information, writing and rewriting accounts, expanding and clarifying maps and listings, and – I hope – shedding some light on the country and the region. It’s often been a battle with Rough Guides, but this is my book, and I love it.

And what a privilege to have the chance to travel Jordan in detail, over so many years – a place of spirit, beauty and profound human warmth. Jordan has changed my life. I will never be able to repay my debt of gratitude to this memorable place and its remarkable people.

I’m old-fashioned enough to think travel guides – proper travel guides written to be read, not Top 10s and bitty web content – can help bridge otherwise unbridgeable gaps. I only hope mine does.

But, naturally, there are horrible mistakes in it, and countless things that are already out of date. If you find any, have a look at this update list I’ve started to see if I’ve already picked it up. If not, please drop me a line.

The tears were flowing before I reached the summit: I remember looking up into the blurry blue. I also remember, further back down the trail, when the old, familiar voices started to sing to me about weakness and tiredness and failure – but even then I knew I’d already beaten them. This time I was going to make it. I remember pouring water into my hat and jamming it back on my head. I remember chocolate. I remember the last few steps – steep ones, cut through rock, with a golden crescent floating above, glimpsed through salty lashes.

It was a place out of reach. A place I’d been looking at for twenty years but had never visited. It was high on the mountain-top, and it was deep down inside myself.

So I cried for the views. I cried for my own achievement. I cried for the holy ground I stood on. I cried for my five-year-old son, who wanted to come with me because he thinks all mountains are white and climbing one to play snowballs with his dad would have been the best game ever. I cried because there was no snow. I cried because I was crying.

In truth, I didn’t want to come down. It was renewal. Sitting there, shaded, looking east, I’d unwittingly become a pilgrim.

My journey to the mountain took almost three years. Back in 2010 I realised an anniversary was approaching for Petra, the great 2000-year-old trading capital of the Nabatean people that is now Jordan’s top tourist attraction. I’d been to Petra maybe twenty times, over almost as many years. I’d been there at sunrise, at noon and after dark. I’d studied it, walked it, watched it, hated it and loved it. But the more I revisited, the less I knew it.

After its antique heyday Petra had lain undiscovered for centuries. Baybars, a Mamluk sultan, passed through in 1276, noting in his diary “most marvellous caves, the façades sculptured into the very rock face.”

But for five hundred years after Baybars – nothing. Knowledge of Petra’s whereabouts faded from outside memory. The locals, of course, knew exactly where it was – but they weren’t telling. At that time, the mountainous country between Damascus and the Red Sea was virtually impenetrable to outsiders. Wild, lawless and largely uninhabited, it lay beyond the reach of any government. There were few roads. Only a scattering of isolated settlements broke the rolling landscapes of stony hills and semi-arid plains that led into the vastnesses of the Arabian interior. Few, if any, travellers got through.

It was in that context that Swiss explorer Jean-Louis Burckhardt travelled. A man of extraordinary resourcefulness, Burckhardt had been hired in 1809 by the London ‘Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa’ to find the source of the River Niger. His plan – to get to Cairo, and from there join a caravan bound for the Sahara – hinged on disguising himself as a Muslim: Christians and other outsiders without protection would have been prey for bandits. Burckhardt adopted the persona of “Sheikh Ibrahim”, a merchant from India.

After two years in Syria, perfecting his Arabic and studying Quranic law, 27-year-old “Sheikh Ibrahim” set off for Cairo, keeping his meticulously updated journal hidden beneath flowing robes. On 22nd August 1812, crossing rough hills, he wrote: “I was desirous of visiting Wadi Musa [the Valley of Moses], of the antiquities of which I had heard the country people speak in terms of great admiration.”

Burckhardt, at that stage, had no idea that Wadi Musa – which lay well off his path – held the ruins of Petra. Moreover, it was a dangerous detour. “A person like myself,” he wrote, “without any papers to show who I was, or why I had taken that circuitous route, would have looked very suspicious. I therefore pretended to have made a vow to slaughter a goat in honour of Haroun [Aaron, Moses’s brother and a venerated prophet in Islam], whose tomb I knew was situated at the extremity of the valley. By this stratagem I thought that I should have the means of seeing the valley on my way to the tomb.”

It was a great idea. By playing the Haroun card Burckhardt was able to talk his way past tribal lookouts. Below Wadi Musa his guide led him into a canyon lined with carvings, and on through an ancient city – which Burckhardt describes in close detail, later identifying it as Petra – before reaching the foot of Aaron’s mountain. By then it was already sunset, and too dark to make the climb: they sacrificed a goat in sight of the tomb on the summit and turned back.

Burckhardt eventually made it to Cairo, staying five years, but in 1817 – shortly before his desert caravan was due to depart – he contracted dysentery and died. His diaries, published posthumously, sparked a worldwide resurgence of interest in Petra which continues to this day.

What a life. What an adventure. And the 200th anniversary of his epic discovery was approaching. I hatched a plan. I was going to walk the same route, down the slopes into Petra then over to Mount Aaron (Jabal Haroun in Arabic) – but then do what Burckhardt could not: I was going to climb the mountain.

According to the Old Testament, the Israelites passed through southern Jordan after their forty years of wandering in the wilderness. Aaron died there, and Petra’s highest peak, soaring to 1,330 metres, has long been associated with him.

A millennium later the Nabateans, builders of Petra, who carved shrines to their gods on summits all round the region, cut a stepped processional way up the holy mountain. Ruins of a Byzantine monastery dedicated to Aaron stand on a col near the top. Legend has it that the Prophet Muhammad climbed the peak as a young boy, travelling with his uncle.

In 1338, the ruling sultan had a new shrine to Haroun built on the mountain-top, replacing a pre-existing chapel. The current incarnation – a modest one-room rectangular building, which dates from a 1495 restoration – is clearly visible from all round Petra, high against the sky. Its whitewashed walls are the first to catch the rays of the rising sun. Its low dome crowns Petra’s jagged horizon every evening in silhouette.

Wherever you go in Petra, Haroun is in constant view – but few make the effort to approach him. I laid plans. It would be an event. There would be donkeys. Camels. Friends jostled to join the trip. I knew August would be too hot – Burckhardt was made of tougher stuff – so I fixed a date in cooler February. Emails were sent. Deals done.

Then erratic 21st-century weather patterns intervened. A week before the big day, Jordanian forecasters predicted a cold front, with plunging temperatures and heavy rain. I called everyone I knew. Teeth were sucked. Voices warned of capricious conditions, out in the canyons.

I arrived into bitter cold: who thinks to pack gloves for Jordan? Hoteliers stayed huddled by gas heaters. Guides were stamping feet and cupping hands round lit cigarettes, coughing smoky steam. Snow blocked the high-altitude roads. Thick skies hid Haroun. I cancelled the camels.

All that summer Haroun filled my mind. On anniversary day, 22nd August 2012, I gave a talk about Burckhardt, and showed pictures of the mountain. It was becoming an obsession.

But something inside me had changed. Respect had grown, and a jolly jamboree now seemed wrong. The mountain, too, had grown. Was I biting off more than I could chew? I pondered going alone, so that I could fail in private. But then I worried about losing the way.

I sent some dates to Yamaan Safady, one of Jordan’s best guides. He climbs mountains – almost literally – every day of the week. He’d probably been up Jabal Haroun a dozen times; it would be a stroll in the park, the slowest walk he’d ever done. Would he be willing? Of course, he said, and we arranged to meet on the first day of December.

By seven in the morning, we were alone amongst the canyons. Rather than follow Burckhardt’s route, Yamaan had proposed a back trail he knew, approaching Petra from the north. We drove to the trailhead through silver streets, cockerels competing with the tinkling neck-bells of goats.

Then distractions faded as we started walking beneath a mackerel sky that pointed arrows to the mountain.

“I wonder why those bedouin haven’t moved down to the desert yet.”

Yamaan had spotted a black tent, pitched some distance away. His voice danced for a while between cliffs before plummeting into the ravine.

“Maybe they’re planting winter wheat. Then they’ll move,” he murmured.

There was a juniper tree – a young one, said Yamaan, only four or five hundred years old – and we paused on an outcrop for water and dried apricots. Buttery sunlight melted down the canyon’s pitted old face. Mesmeric views went past the sandstone ridges, bent on their igneous black foundations, an unfathomable thousand metres down to the desert floor and beyond, out to the Holy Land.

Past a ledge above a chasm – hug the cliff, ordered Yamaan, and feel for the way with your feet – the going became sandy. I stumbled over bulbs of sea squill, sprouting at the foot of a rocky climb.

“Goats hate them too,” grinned Yamaan. “But crested porcupines dig up one or two. I met some hunters a couple of weeks ago; they said they caught a porcupine as big as a lamb. Look!”

He broke off as an orange flash darted across the cliff-framed sky.

“Tristram’s grackle! Shiny black, but the male has orange patches on his wing.”

When Burckhardt hired a guide for the walk to Jabal Haroun, he paid him with a pair of old horseshoes. Burckhardt, you see, didn’t have Yamaan.

I thought I spied a cairn, silhouetted ahead. Then my jaw fell. As we approached, I realised it was the immense carved urn atop Petra’s largest façade, the Monastery. In twenty years I’d never seen the building from this angle. Wider and taller than the west front of Westminster Abbey, it – like most of Petra – had been carved from solid rock two thousand years ago. Perhaps a royal tomb, or a gathering-place for religious ceremonies, though never a monastery, it defies scale. The doorway alone is taller than a house; the urn I saw towers fifty metres above the ground.

The Monastery is the furthest and highest that most tourists go in Petra. As we descended the main access route – comprising about 750 rock-cut steps – threads of trudgers were puffing their way up.

We came down into Petra from the back, crossing the central Colonnaded Street beside temples, tent cafés and loitering camels. The hubbub was like a service station on the motorway: brief, a little dizzying. It was a relief to walk through and re-establish the rhythm of the journey.

Beyond the Amud Faraoun, a lone column standing on the slopes, we encountered no more tourists. Views opened across undulating country, with the white shrine of Haroun always visible on its distant peak as we skirted the titanic cliffs of Umm al-Biyara, heading south out of Petra.

Past the Snake Monument, a huge block carved by the ancient Nabateans as a coiled serpent, the path descended into Wadi Sabra, vast, sunny and silent. It led us around to approach Jabal Haroun from the shadeless southwest. I’d been walking seven hours, and could now hear the voices of tiredness and defeat.

Everything was about putting feet in front of feet. Yamaan saw and walked ahead, letting me fight my own fights. There was no climbing, or even scrambling. It was just an uphill walk, partly on steps cut by the Nabateans. But it was, somehow, the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Crystal sunlight poured from translucent skies. One switchback revealed views over the back of the mountain into unimaginably deep canyons, guarded by a single, luminous juniper. There was purity.

Near the top I heard a high, cracked voice. “This way!” it said. “I’ve been watching you the last two hours.”

After brewing us the sweetest, hottest tea at her shack by the fenced-in ruins of the Byzantine monastery, perched on a plateau below the final summit, brown-toothed Tamam wiped her hands on her old black dress, adjusted her headscarf, popped the key of Haroun’s tomb into a pocket and led us to the last few steps. We were going to meet a saint.

The whole Burckhardt anniversary, which had driven me onwards since the beginning, meant nothing now. He’d climbed his own mountains. This was me, climbing mine.

Back at home, a friend nodded when I told her I cried at the top.

“Some places do that to you,” she said.

That reminded me of what Rosalyn Maqsood wrote, in her excellent book on Petra:

Believers accept that certain localities can be impregnated with the life-giving force of some saint or hero. Traces of their essential virtue would cling to their mortal leavings even though their spirits had passed to another world, and [would] be continually renewed by the constant stream of prayer and devotion emanating from the pilgrims who found their way there. These places are visited to gain healing, or fertility, or protection against dangers, or whatever is the desire of the heart. Jabal Haroun is such a place.

It is.

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© Matthew Teller. All rights reserved. Do not copy.

Published in National Geographic Traveller, March 2013. Text here.

Matthew Teller travelled independently with award-winning Jordanian hiking guide Yamaan Safady. Email yamaan@adventurejordan.com. For more information, buy the Rough Guide to Jordan.

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The three-part series was filmed over almost two years in the UAE, Jordan and Oman, during 2011 and 2012. Apparently, it is set to feature the first high-definition images of Arabian leopards. Here’s an old news story from the Abu Dhabi National explaining more – and here’s the lowdown from BBC producer Chadden Hunter in a 2min video interview.

From the few clips currently available on the BBC website – click here to see them – it looks, frankly, sensational. Camera operator John Aitchison blogged some superb stills here – wow; those Dubai flamingoes! More pictures on a public Facebook page here and more crew blogging here.

All of this comes on the back of the original Wild Arabia, a natural history of the Middle East that went out on Radio 4 as three half-hour episodes in 2007. You can listen to the whole series online here. It’s well worth it – more serious and thoughtful than (in my entirely humble opinion) TV could ever be, presented by a field biologist (Tessa McGregor), focused squarely on nature across the region and drawing in opinion and observation from scientists and experts.

That makes me wonder how much of the new TV Wild Arabia is actually about the natural world. It seems that it’s more of a portrait of the contemporary Middle East, from urban society and cityscapes to ancient history, mixed in with typically beautiful BBC nature sequences too. That’s all good: animals without people is, rightly, a no-no nowadays.

Another question: how much of this is going to be a promo for Abu Dhabi and/or Dubai? It seems like the rest of Arabia gets pretty short shrift. I’d be interested to learn more about how the series came about – who pitched it, how the concept was developed, why they chose to limit the geographical scope.

My reservations notwithstanding, could this, finally, be an intelligent portrait of contemporary Arabia on mainstream, primetime TV? How wonderful if it is. But if so, how come it took the BBC’s Natural History Unit to deliver? Ha!

Anyway, it’s about time. Looking forward keenly.

You can pre-order the DVD here, before the series even airs.

I was recently in Amman, and had to visit people in Tel Aviv. I used the bus to cross westwards but then, for complicated reasons, shelled out for the short flight back. It’s absurdly expensive – about 100km (60 miles ish) as the crow flies, for a fare of almost £200 (almost US$300). Royal Jordanian is the only scheduled airline operating the route, so they can charge more or less what they like.

The advantage is you’re flying over epic terrain. While the aircraft maintains a low, flat cruising altitude, the land does a rollercoaster underneath you – dropping away from the hills around Jerusalem down roughly 1500 metres (5000 ft) to the lowest point on Earth at the Dead Sea, then back up another 1500m to the Transjordanian plateau. Less than half an hour after glimpsing the Mediterranean Sea, you’re set down in the vast open desert fringing Arabia. You cross the biblical River Jordan. You fly from the place where Jesus died to the place where Moses died. From a country cut off from its neighbours, you reach a country bound into the regional flow of ideas. It’s a journey between worlds.

And TLV-AMM is a surprisingly popular little connection. Israeli carriers are barred from the airspace of most Middle Eastern countries, so to fly east into Asia they must take a circuitous route (in blue on the map) out over the Mediterranean, north over Turkey, then east over the Central Asian ‘Stans before heading south. By contrast, Royal Jordanian (and all other carriers, cheaper Asian ones among them) can fly a direct route east over Iraq, Iran and Pakistan airspace (in red on the map). Flight time to Bangkok is around 11 hours from Tel Aviv – but from Amman it’s 8hrs 20min. To get to Mumbai takes 8 hours from Tel Aviv, or 5 hours from Amman.

So there was an interesting mix boarding at Ben Gurion airport – several Indian-looking couples apparently heading home with a maxed-out baggage allowance, lots of people who looked Thai and Filipino, also laden down with stuff, and a fair smattering of young Israeli backpacker types presumably seeking enlightenment in Goa or Kathmandu or somewhere. All of them were using this breakfast-time hop to connect with shorter, cheaper onward flights from Amman.

Then there was an excitable Dutch family group who seemed to be on holiday. Plus one single Arab business person – a guy in a sharp suit, with an accent that sounded Jordanian. (Palestinians, incidentally, are prohibited by Israel from passing through Ben Gurion airport.) And me.

Oh, and this guy.

He’s the (supposedly inconspicuous) plain-clothes sky marshal, at least one of whom is present on every single Royal Jordanian flight for the safety of passengers and crew. He did wake up just before takeoff, incidentally. Then he read the newspaper, until the businessman came over to say hello; they chatted over coffee and cakes most of the flight.

The aircraft was titchy – an Embraer 175. I’d been seated over the wing, but even before takeoff I moved to the (empty) back of the plane to grab a window seat on the right-hand side.

On the tarmac at TLV, this happened:

A Royal Jordanian wingtip set against an El Al tailfin. Tell me in the comments if you find the visual juxtaposition inspiring, shameful, repellent, uplifting, or just ordinary.

Immediately after takeoff, this view opened up over the poor benighted communities living around TLV’s perimeter fence:

We flew west for a few seconds, then banked around to head east. As we did so, I snapped this:

On the right are the hotel towers by Tel Aviv beach, looking over the blue expanse of the Mediterranean. On the left, lit by a patch of sun, is the hill of Jaffa, once Palestine’s biggest port (mentioned in the Old Testament), and still an important centre of Palestinian population, out of which Tel Aviv grew in the 20th century. More here.

In less than a minute we were flying over what I think is Lod:

Lod has its own, tragic history. It’s now significant as a railway junction – you can see the rail lines merging at a big station in the right midground.

It took me several minutes to grasp how fast we were covering ground. By the time I realised where we were, we’d already passed over Ramallah – too far north to see Jerusalem – and the ground was starting to drop away into the Jordan Valley. This road, wiggling from top left to bottom right:

…is, I think, Palestine’s Tariq Al Mu’arrajat (Road of Curves), coiling from Taybeh down into the Jordan Valley. I wrote about it in this story.

Here it is again:

This time the road crosses left-to-right in midground.

By now the light was changing, and I was able to take a clearer image of the beautiful rolling landscapes of the West Bank, and its deep canyons leading down to the Jordan Valley.

I love that view.

Seconds later we reached the floor of the Jordan Valley

Abrupt cliffs hem in the ancient desert city of Jericho. One of those cliffs holds the place where Jesus was tempted by Satan. The road leading north-south along the floor of the Jordan Valley is visible at the bottom of the frame.

Finger-like canyons cut through Jericho’s soft desert, carrying moisture down into the River Jordan.

And here is the Jordan itself, directly below us:

Fed by canyons to east and west, set down in the wrinkled, folded ghor, the Jordan forms a ribbon of fertility through the desert – though the river itself is almost indiscernible amid the undergrowth.

Here’s another view, showing the tortuous meanders of the river:

Towards the top of the frame you can see a bridge crossing the jungle-like thickets of the river. That is the Allenby (or King Hussein) Bridge, the crossing-point between Jordan and the West Bank – and the only route by which Israel allows Palestinians to leave the country to travel overseas. Here’s a closer look:

Just south of the bridge (towards the top of the picture, though hard to see) is the Baptism Site at Bethany-beyond-the-Jordan, where John baptised Jesus.

Now we’re flying over Jordan (the country). Here, again, is the meandering River Jordan:

It is flowing towards the hazy lake at the top of the frame. You can see that lake better on this pic:

That squared-off expanse of blue is the northernmost tip of the Dead Sea – salty, smelly, greasy, hazy, itchy, sweaty and utterly extraordinary. Have you been? You should, even if only once. Floating unaided on a hot, silent sea, flanked by sun-scorched mountains, is quite a thing.

Here’s another look:

Then the land started to change again. I took a quick snap looking back:

In the foreground are the patchwork fields around South Shuneh in Jordan. Then in midground you can see the squiggle of the River Jordan. In the back are the cliffs and ridges of the Jerusalem Wilderness, or Judean Desert, in Palestine.

Seconds later we were flying over the immense canyons feeding rivers down from the high mountains of Jordan’s Balqa region:

That huge valley system in front may be Wadi Shuayb, the Valley of Jethro, coursing down from the old Ottoman town of Salt.

The land quickly rose up to meet us, forming the Transjordanian plateau – high ground flanking the east side of the River Jordan and Dead Sea. Closer beneath us now, threading a path between scattered towns, I could see an old road:

This is what’s known as the King’s Highway, for millennia the main road between Syria and Egypt – and still one of the best drives you can do in rural Jordan.

On the other hand, there’s this:

This is the Desert Highway, known in this section as the Airport Road, speeding south from Amman (underneath us) past the airport where we’re about to land, all the way to Jordan’s southern border with Saudi Arabia.

Then, after heading east into morning sun the whole trip, finally we banked again and the light was kinder.

I love this picture – it’s Jordan.

Here’s another look:

Gentle desert, crinkled like skin.

By now we were on final approach…

But the desert was still glowing. Temptingly empty. I daydreamt, briefly, of spending the rest of my life in sand, without roads or calendars.

And then…

That was it. Tarmac at Queen Alia airport, Amman. Total flight time, from wheels up to wheels down – roughly 25 minutes (I forgot to time it exactly, sorry).

There was some kind of bread thing. A carton of drink. Very little legroom. Or headroom. The atmosphere was a bit odd.

But I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

I talked about guidebooks, about how tours work and other things – but here is the bit where I tried to explain, for a general audience, what’s happening in the Middle East at the moment, and how both we, as consumers, and the travel industry as a whole could respond to it.

It’s mostly as I spoke it, polished up just a little. Note: I chose not to discuss Israel, partly because it has its own tourism context focused on VFR and Christian pilgrimage, but mostly because it is generally well insulated from the effects of political upheavals elsewhere.

…So how does all this relate to what’s going on in the Middle East at the moment – what’s been called the ‘Arab Spring’?

First of all, the ‘Arab Spring’ is a misnomer – implies a single revolutionary event – which, of course, the news media love – in fact the whole region is going through profound social and political change – a transformation, which will take years…

What is it about? Day by day, in contrast to what news media might say, my sense is it’s not driven by democracy or human rights or equality, or any of those grand ideals. If I had to sum it up, it’s about ACCOUNTABILITY.

People from Morocco to Tunisia to Egypt to Saudi Arabia to Bahrain to Oman have been ruled by leaders – sheikhs, presidents, monarchs – who are effectively unaccountable (not in every case: traditional systems of accountability do exist, but even they are creaking under pressure).

Large swathes of those people are increasingly fed up with it.

I was in Kuwait recently, where there have been large demonstrations by the political opposition and others, challenging the status quo – someone there clarified it for me – he said people are asking for CLEAR REGULATORY AUTHORITY. How boring is that? Not democracy, not equality, not all that grand stuff, but simply accountable regulation. People don’t want to be ruled by whim or decree anymore.

That’s a revolution. It’s also an uprising against authority. But it is not a single, one-off event.

Building the kind of nation to replace the hideously invasive, militarised police state Egypt suffered under Mubarak, or the psychopathic repression inflicted on Syria by the Assad regime, or even the widespread corruption in Jordan, with a balanced constitution where the rule of law is respected, where accountable politicians debate, and where there is transparency in government allied with freedom of expression – that takes years. Generations.

It is not one news story, after which everything goes back to ‘normal’ – despite whatever Egypt’s tourism minister might wishfully think.

Down the tubes

Here’s a thought. Tourism does very well under dictatorships. The global travel industry loves stability even more than the White House does. Tourism in Egypt boomed under Mubarak, when developments JUST GOT BUILT and when nobody asked too many questions (because if you did you could end up in the Nile wearing concrete underpants). Ben Ali, Tunisia’s tinpot dictator who was the first to fall, back in 2011, oversaw his country’s tourism industry develop from nothing, even while his police forces were pulling out people’s fingernails in the torture cells under Tunis.

Even Assad in Syria – I remember 2006 and 07, when there seemed to be a genuine window for reform – I wrote several articles on the tourism opportunities opening up in a freer Syria…

This is not to condemn anybody in travel for complicity with dictatorship, passive or otherwise. None of us foresaw the uprisings. Nobody did – not journalists, not analysts, not the people themselves.

But now, today, instability means Middle East tourism – particularly in Egypt – is down the tubes.

In Egypt in 2010, 15 million tourists brought in £7 billion in revenue.

In 2012, tourism numbers dropped by 4 million – and revenue was cut by £2 billion.

And that mostly happened during what was thought of as a period of recovery. That all ended on 22nd November last year, when the elected president granted himself unlimited powers to “protect the nation”, which brought hundreds of thousands of people back out onto the street in protest. That public anger at the unaccountability of power, and incompetence in government, remains at boiling point.

As a consequence, in Luxor and Aswan hotel occupancy rates are down at 5% – in Cairo 15% – even Sharm and other Red Sea resorts are only half full. That’s despite crazy loss-leading offers. Jordan, too, has got it in the neck. Lebanon is desperate. Tunisia is struggling. Bahrain is finished. Only Dubai is booming.

Normal no more

Here’s a prediction. If “normal” is what the situation was in 2010 before the Arab uprisings began, then Middle East tourism will not be going “back to normal”. Ever.

There’s a new pattern emerging.

And new opportunities – which most of the travel industry is missing, because they’re too worried by the news headlines to notice.

If you forget about “normal”, there’s a chance presenting itself to rebuild the KIND of tourism the Middle East can offer.

Sustainable.

Responsible.

Tourism with integrity.

Tourism where money and resources are channelled to the people of the host destination, rather than siphoned off by big-business cronies of the ruling elite – which is what was happening cheerfully under Mubarak in Egypt, Ben Ali in Tunisia and is still the case, in marginally different circumstances, in Dubai and the Gulf.

My sense is – as in food, media and a dozen other areas of life – our taste for industrially produced tourism on a mass scale is fading. These days, we want better. At the moment the travel industry is failing us – it’s too slow, and too hidebound by fossilised business practices to react nimbly – but the economic clout it carries, especially in the countries of the Middle East, could be a key driver for tangible change in the region. The travel industry, if it could see what’s happening more clearly, could be prompting root-and-branch innovation in the host countries, driving social integration and helping erase inequalities, and could equally be inspiring new outlooks and new approaches to the Middle East within tourists’ home countries.

At the moment, it is doing neither, because it’s focused on the 2010 way of doing things. Meanwhile, the Middle East has irrevocably, fundamentally and permanently changed.

Bucking the trend

Funnily enough, Jordan – or, rather, Jordanians, since it’s almost always the private sector driving change, not the government – are already bucking the trend.

Jordanians in travel have been busy the last couple of years reinventing their country away from the standard model of cultural-historical big bus tourism, led by the big players, and into a more niche outlook of adventure-style responsible tourism, down at the grassroots.

There are lots of examples. Up in the north is the region’s first-ever community-owned, community-run tourism initiative, the Al Ayoun Trail, where three untouristed hill villages are working together to develop a walking trail, country lodging, homestays and rural enterprises. In the south is Feynan, a desert eco-hotel far off the road, where everything is sourced locally, from food to guides, and where there’s a sense that the business is genuinely part of the rural economy – there’s a cultural to-and-fro at Feynan that’s very hard to find elsewhere (and is the antithesis of similar experiences in the UAE and Oman). Many others in Jordan in similar vein – food, wine, adventure sports and more.

Thanks to the Lebanon Mountain Trail Lebanon now has homestays across the country offering homespun lodging and food – you’ll also find farmers’ markets in Beirut, vineyard tours. Lebanon does rural tourism very well, but most of the media never cover it – they just do the standard Beirut nightlife stories, fawning over swanky hotels and that absurd high-roller lifestyle…

Palestine is a fabulous holiday destination – almost completely untainted by that big-business tourism ethic – from north to south you can be staying with families, exploring city souks and tiny centuries-old stone villages, walking in the hills, or visiting world-class cultural sites. Palestine is a cracking place to spend time, safe, charming, endlessly fascinating – but I challenge you to find one company at this show [Destinations] that could sell you a touring holiday to Palestine.

Nobody knows about it.

Even the Gulf is experiencing something of the same turnaround – there are small tourism operators even in the big-glitz UAE – I kayaked off the coast of Abu Dhabi with Noukhada – in Dubai there are now rootsy, locally run food tours of the city’s older, unvisited districts – and so on, including Oman.

There’s even some of this coming through in Egypt, with retreats and voluntourism-style working holidays in Sinai, for example.

The old tourism will survive, for sure, for many years to come – but the terms of what is ‘normal’ are shifting – it’s up to each country in the Middle East to plot a new and better path, and it’s up to us to reshape our idea of what the region is all about.

Instability. Opportunity. Speciality.

This year, next year, for several years to come, expect INSTABILITY. The Middle East is going through a prolonged revolutionary episode, driven by popular discontent. It will not be over quickly. Even when the killing stops, things won’t settle for years ahead. Work with – and around – the instability.

OPPORTUNITY. Tourism matters hugely to this region. In almost every country it’s at or near the top of the list of contributors to GDP. Buying a package holiday includes protections, of course, but you pay for that with a series of mark-ups – and so do the ordinary people on the ground, who often see little or nothing of the money you spend to visit their country. Once, we didn’t know any better. But now we don’t need to rely on middlemen any longer. Use sources of knowledge – guidebooks, internet searches, social media – to connect with local providers where you want to go. The region’s changes are an opportunity to reshape how we visit these places. Book direct. Take local advice. Don’t rush. See more.

Instead of a bog-standard tour, go for the SPECIALITY option. If you’ve been to Jordan already to see Petra and the ruins, go back to stay with a family, or learn how to cook stuffed vine-leaves, or do some country cycling – get to know the place on YOUR terms, not how a London-based tour company wants you to see it.

Change is good

Hospitality is a key aspect of Arab culture – people are fantastically welcoming – but because of the way tourism has developed in all these countries, as a state-directed driver of the national economy, and because of the cultural imperatives dictating the formality of the relationship between guest and host, all these countries have built tourist industries that essentially keep tourists away from locals.

That, at last, is changing. We need to change with it.

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Before I went to Kuwait I was given a contact to bidoon activist Abdulhakeem Al Fadhli, and during my short visit to the country was able to meet him – an extraordinary man, aged 36, who has given up his job, his income and his prospects in order to devote his energy to demanding human rights and being (as he put it) “the biggest troublemaker” to the Kuwaiti government. On 18 February 2011, as protests were sweeping across Tunisia and Egypt, Al-Fadhli attended a demonstration for the first time in his life, he explained, only to be faced by water cannon, tear gas and rubber bullets. “I knew I needed to fight,” was what he said to me.

As protest organizer for Kuwait’s bidoon community – something he can only realistically do using social media – he has been in and out of jail several times over the last two years, sleeping in different homes almost every night, swapping temporary sim cards in and out of multiple phones, only using an encrypted internet connection, abandoning his car to ride with different friends. He was scathing about the government’s attempts to crush the protests: “copy-paste tactics,” he called them.

As I say in the piece, since I met him Al-Fadhli has been rearrested, and at the time of writing is currently in jail awaiting a retrial on a charge (apparently subsequently withdrawn) of assaulting a police officer, for which he was given a two-year jail sentence in absentia.

There is much more to tell, which I’ll save for another time. While I was with him, Al-Fadhli explained the bidoon story first-hand and took me to meet activists and ordinary people. This short report (below) was the result – the briefest of introductions to a complex tale of injustice.

Click here to listen to audio from BBC Radio 4, or click here to download the podcast (MP3 file: 13MB). A slightly shorter version went out on BBC World Service radio. I have pasted the full text transcript – including material cut from the radio version – here below. It’s a story which needs telling over and over.

The tailor leaned forward, tweaked some wild rocket off the bunch, deftly rolled it together with cardamom-flavoured rice and shreds of lamb, then popped the bite-sized ball into his mouth.

“This government,” he said, between chews, “they are fascists. Face like sheep, heart like a wolf.”

In an airy tent pitched on the desert plains west of Kuwait City I’d been greeted by a circle of plump, middle-aged men. After coffee, dates and tea, the twelve of us squatted on the carpeted ground for lunch together.

The tailor, like the rest, was bidoon – short for bidoon jinsiyya, meaning “without nationality”. Kuwaiti in culture, language and sensibility, he was nonetheless officially stateless, lacking citizenship or rights.

The bidoons’ story starts in the years around 1961, when Kuwait gained independence from Britain – but how some people at that time came to be citizens while others did not remains unclear to this day.

Kuwait’s 1959 Nationality Act granted citizenship to those able to prove residential ties extending back before 1920. This chiefly covered the urban merchant class and ruling elite, but left many excluded. The government line is that newer arrivals either tried to hoodwink officials into granting them citizenship by declaring false information, or simply excluded themselves.

The latter, at least, has the ring of truth. The concept of nationality was unfamiliar at the time, particularly for the semi-nomadic bedouin, who roamed without recourse to border authorities.

Amidst a climate of suspicion during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, Kuwait amended the Nationality Act to define the bidoon as “illegal residents”, expelling many.

After Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait was ended by the 1991 Gulf War, the bidoon who remained found themselves accused of collaboration, sacked from government jobs and increasingly marginalised.

Today the bidoon number at least 106,000 people, though no reliable figures exist. They remain effectively barred from public education and most jobs, unable to get birth certificates or own property. The tailor at my desert lunch explained that he had to register his car and his business in the name of a Kuwaiti friend. Another man showed me a marriage document which gave his wife’s nationality as “under investigation”.

A government committee examines individual cases, but officials – like many Kuwaitis – assert that most or all of the bidoon are foreigners who have concealed their identity to gain the material benefits of Kuwaiti citizenship: free education, free healthcare, no taxes, subsidised housing, lavish unemployment benefit, a monthly food allowance, and more.

Rights campaigner Dr Rana Al-Abdulrazzak, a director at Kuwait’s Central Blood Bank, highlights the role of state-controlled media. “We neglected the bidoon issue because we couldn’t see it,” she told me. “It was never discussed.”

She goes further, accusing the Sunni ruling elite of discriminating against the bidoon, many of whom are Shia. “We’ve been taught to be selfish: Kuwaitis are very racist,” she said.

Such candour is rare, though most Kuwaitis shun the bidoon, either for sectarian reasons, or often through a sense of urban superiority.

At a meeting in Kuwait City, an architect from an elite family – speaking on condition of anonymity – told me: “The bidoon have no leverage, but they are in all senses Kuwaiti. Citizenship is their right.”

He declared a two-cent rise in fuel prices would cover the “negligible” cost of absorbing the bidoon, and described the situation as “shockingly inhuman”.

“It is apartheid,” he said.

I drove with bidoon activist Abdulhakeem Al-Fadhli to Taima, on the outskirts of the capital. Tin-roofed shacks flanked an open drain, flowing along broken alleyways. A patch of waste ground, where bidoon rights’ demonstrators face down the security forces’ tear gas and rubber bullets, has been defiantly renamed “Freedom Square”.

At a diwaniya, or social gathering, in Taima, Al-Fadhli explained his reliance on social media.

“The Arab Spring gave us the biggest motivation to believe we can do something,” he said, emphasising that the bidoon were opposing the government, not the monarch.

“But,” he added, “we know America will not come for us.”

Since I met him Al-Fadhli has been re-arrested following a fresh round of protests, and is awaiting retrial following a two-year jail sentence imposed in absentia. Campaigners allege that he has been beaten and tortured while in police custody.

A constitutional monarchy with an elected parliament, Kuwait is generally freer than its Gulf neighbours. Yet having ignored the bidoon for so long, it must now deal with an entire disaffected generation, born in poverty, raised with little or no schooling and now self-educated in human rights.

As across the Arab world, the status quo appears increasingly untenable. Absorbing the bidoon into mainstream society would anger many Kuwaitis. But inaction could be costlier.

For fuller information on the bidoon, see this 2011 report by Human Rights Watch. To track the protests go to BedoonRights.org, a site curated by Mona Kareem.

“Satan only likes dirty places.”

Salim’s round eyes watched me, making sure I understood.

“He waits in toilets and rubbish bins. But if he smells this –” Salim grabbed a ceramic frankincense burner off the counter and wafted clouds of resinous white smoke under my nose – “Satan stays away.”

Omanis take smell seriously. Arrive in Muscat and the first thing you notice is a lingering, seductive fragrance. Traditional ankle-length dishdasha robes, worn by men throughout the Gulf, in Oman feature a unique aromatic accessory: a dangling tassel, woven into the collar, that is dipped daily into scented oil. Omanis drift about in a cloud of their own sweetness.

But these are not the blended whiffs of commercial perfumiers. Souks and malls overflow with natural products that smell lovely. Visitors invariably latch onto culinary spices, but for locals the aromatics matter far more. Splinters of oud, a resinous wood imported from Cambodia, sell at wildly inflated prices for burning in the home. Bukhoor, woodchips soaked in aromatic oils, are equally popular.

The daddy of them all is lubban, or frankincense, golden pearls of resin that, when burned, smell so heavenly Satan himself, it seems, dare not approach. In the bewitchingly smoky souk of Oman’s second city, Salalah, frankincense vendor Salim wafted more devilproof fumes my way. A little bit peaches, a little bit furniture, it smelled to me like ancient history.

A thousand kilometres from Muscat, southern Oman’s Dhofar region is where the scraggly tree Boswellia sacra thrives. Its sap is what we know as frankincense, harvested by painstakingly scraping away bark, then returning days later to pick off the globules of hardened resin. Heated over embers to release the smoke, it has been central to religious ritual across the Mediterranean world for millennia. Ancient Rome imported vast quantities of the stuff on a complicated supply network that led back, via camel caravan routes across the desert, to the sole, far-distant source – Dhofar.

I spent days meandering around the low-rise Dhofari capital Salalah, watching shadows lengthen across whitewashed arches (the city’s name derives from a local word for “white”) and sipping sweet water from freshly opened coconuts, sold at roadside stalls beneath towering palm groves. Beside the excellent frankincense museum, packed with detail on maritime history, I dropped into Basma Alnobe’s shop, selling frankincense oil, frankincense water, even frankincense soap. Men may harvest the resin, she smiled, “but it takes a woman to judge quality.”

The Queen of Sheba would agree. Her local palace lay just east of Salalah, by the coastal creek of Khor Rori. At the shadeless ruins of Sumhuram, above the creek, I looked down into the long galleries where frankincense would have been stored before being shipped to Yemen and up the Red Sea. It is said that Nero burned an entire year’s supply at the funeral of his second wife, Poppaea, in 65 AD. I tried – and failed – to imagine the quantities involved.

Two hours north of Salalah, over the mountains that ring the coastal plain and into the sandy deserts beyond, the scanty ruins of Ubar lay mute beside scorched noticeboards. This former frankincense trading city was destroyed roughly 1500 years ago in a cataclysm so huge it merited retelling in the Quran. It seems a giant sinkhole opened up without warning, swallowing the city – and memory of its location. Ubar was only rediscovered in 1992 using satellite tracking by a team led by Sir Ranulph Fiennes, and today remains far off the beaten track, a whistle-stop site on the edge of an immense desert.

I sat for a while with community elder Bakheit bin Abdullah, who dug with Fiennes. “We’ve already lost many things,” he told me. “Life is good, but tourism is coming. I fear for the future here.”

I reassured him as best I could. In terms of Western tourism, Salalah isn’t even a blip on the radar. Oman Air runs shuttles from Muscat and Dubai, and Qatar Airways launches Doha flights next May, but that’s hardly a stampede. Weekly charters from Stockholm and Helsinki deposit a few blinking Scandinavians onto the beaches each winter, and occasional cruise ships use the deepwater port as a stop-off between the Red Sea and the Gulf, but for nine months of the year Salalah slumbers.

That changes every summer, when the Indian Ocean monsoon brushes past. From June to September, while the rest of Arabia bakes, rain drizzles onto Salalah from grey skies, fog envelops the beaches and temperatures plummet to a balmy 20C. Saudis, Bahrainis and Emiratis pack into Salalah in their thousands: every soggy mountain meadow hosts an extended family, delightedly picnicking in the rain. The desert they have at home. Wet green grass makes a holiday.

Yet dodge the monsoon to visit in quiet October, as I did, and you experience scenery like no other in Arabia, under crystal-clear skies washed blue and luminous by the summer rains. The greenery persists: it could almost be Derbyshire, these rolling uplands cut by scrubby folded valleys – until you spot camels silhouetted on the ridge-tops.

“First we had frankincense, then we found oil,” one insightful young Dhofari told me. “The next generation’s wealth will come in solar power – but we will always love frankincense.”

That passion crosses cultures. When Shakespeare wanted an image to counter the stink of corruption, he had a distraught Lady Macbeth mutter, “All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.”

But he’d never been to Salalah. They’d have just the thing for her there.

I woke to the roar of total silence. Issa, an Omani bedouin of the Al-Maashani tribe, made tea as the orange-lit theatrics of sunrise began behind us. It was just him, me and the soundless dunes of the Empty Quarter.

Dinner had been Issa’s too – chopped camel meat fried in camel fat, chewy and delicious, washed down with ginger tea. Afterwards, we’d chit-chatted companionably in the dark, staring upwards as the Milky Way slid across a pinprick sky like the arch above Wembley Stadium.

We were camped in what the explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes had called “a place of wind and spiders”. In his day it was known as Fasad, or “Decay”. The spot had since been euphemistically renamed Al-Hashman, meaning “Wholesome” – but with its broken walls and foully undrinkable spring water, that struck me as an oddly mirthless piece of spin.

There’s a lot of that in Oman these days, as the country paddles ever harder to maintain its trademark swan-like serenity. The Arab Spring has come knocking. Last month a local journalist was jailed, accused of slander – the most high-profile of, so far, 42 court cases related to issues of public protest.

Like most of its neighbours, Oman saw street protests last year and earlier this year – though protesters were calling mainly for salary increases and lower living costs, rather than revolutionary overthrow.

The result, unusually, was a flurry of reforms. Oman’s autocratic ruler, Sultan Qaboos, created tens of thousands of new government jobs, raised the minimum wage and introduced cost of living allowances for public sector workers.

He also reshuffled his cabinet three times in twelve months, purging unpopular ministers.

This nimble response took the wind out of protesters’ sails. In the southern port city of Salalah, a local business leader chuckled. “What the people wanted, they got,” he told me. “There’s nothing to protest about anymore.”

But not everyone agrees. Omanis I talked to expressed concern that the sultan’s populist initiatives are merely an attempt to postpone genuine structural reforms. They might keep people quiet for five years, even ten – but then what?

And like the failed dictators of Egypt, Libya and Syria, Qaboos has personally identified himself with the Omani state. He is childless but has named no heir. It is illegal to insult him – but what counts as an insult is open to interpretation.

A man who told me, “Sultan Qaboos is thinking like it’s the 1980s,” refused – perhaps wisely – to give me his name.

Over ice-cream sundaes in Salalah, I talked with Abdullah Al-Amiri, a systems analyst.

“Change is already affecting this country in healthy ways,” he said. “But it is going very slowly.”

For Abdullah one key marker is social media. From desert herders to fashionable young students, almost everyone you meet is on Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp – or all three.

The ubiquity of social media, and the impossibility of controlling them, is causing panic. The government has been busy all summer prosecuting – and jailing – dozens of online activists.

Yet the red lines aren’t fixed. Instead, it’s all about self-censorship. Lawyer Riyadh Al-Balushi told me the law is ambiguous. “The barriers to freedom of expression are not legal,” he said. “They are internal.”

Oman’s coastal capital Muscat lines up like sugar cubes on a narrow shelf. It is seductively calm: holidaymakers and Western expats move from villas and malls to the glittering new opera house freely, without hindrance.

But wait at the coffeeshops after dark to talk to some of Muscat’s bloggers and tweeters, and a different picture emerges, of tell-tale clicks on the line during phone conversations, of unusual activity on Facebook pages.

One prolific Twitter user, a young Omani woman in a headscarf, gives me an old-fashioned look. “Of course the government is reading my tweets,” she says.

The country’s most popular political website is Sabla, a chatroom allowed to operate as a safety valve. Omanis joke that the first thing new ministers do is log onto Sabla to see what people are saying about them.

As a local journalist explained, the authorities will generally let whatever is said in English pass. But they care deeply about what is said in Arabic – to the point of jailing dissenters.

Yet showing one face to the neighbours and another to the world is a strategy that rings hollow for Oman’s globally connected youth, who are easily able to join the dots for themselves.

It seems only a matter of time before Omanis start using social media to hold the government to account.

As one young Omani told me, “Everyone loves Sultan Qaboos – but older people love him more.”

With the monarch about to turn 72, but almost three-quarters of his population under the age of 25, Oman’s generation game is coming to a head.

How I got started

Feel like a fraud

not qualified journalist

losing excitement for constant travel

tend to feel that tourism industry – though full of great ppl – often does more harm than good in world

don’t make money from blogging

(barely make any money at all)

my living comes from print – guidebooks, old media – and PR-style editing/copywriting

here bc a region of world has become part of my life – Middle East

in 20s & early 30s spent 10yrs learning about region – writing bits & bobs but mostly just making ends meet

spent last 10yrs writing about region

visiting & revisiting & revisiting

I’m prob least well-travelled person in this room – haven’t counted, but 25 countries in total, maybe 30 – but I’ve visited some of them dozens of times – go to Jordan 2/3/4 times a year, perhaps 30,40,50 times in total. That’s my specialisation.

So that’s just to say where I’m coming from.

 If had time again, what would I do different? 2 things:

 1 – get training in (journalism), or rather independent, critical writing

2 – wouldn’t get involved with PR at all. Explain why:

What is quality writing?

V hard to define. Quality is unforced – feels natural, looks effortless, even though years of training & technique may have gone into it. Think Usain Bolt – you think he just woke up one day and could run like that? He trained for years and years.

Quality is also something you can see, even if you don’t like it – Paulo Coelho – may make you sick, but he can clearly string a thought or two together.

Often easier to define quality by what it isn’t. 

PR is antithetical to quality writing.

Marketing slightly different – is about taking product/destination – find what’s good in it & tell ppl about that

PR – there doesn’t have to be anything good there. PR is simply about taking anything – a movie, a ski resort, the Bahraini government – and getting people to like it & (most important) spend money on it.

Here’s a truth, borne from experience: writing PR will seriously damage the quality of what you write for everything else. PR is corrosive. PR undermines independent thought and judgement.

There’s a reason why writers generally make awful copywriters – take a journalist or a novelist & ask them to write advertising, and it’ll be rubbish. The stuff they use is the same (ie words), but the reasons for writing it are diametrically opposed.

Quote from Orwell – “journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed; everything else is PR.”

Let’s take that & look at travel blogging now.

Are YOU publishing something that someone else doesn’t want publishing? If not – if all you’re doing is augmenting what’s already out there, you’re not a writer, you’re a copywriter.

That’s fine – there’s space for everyone, these are NOT value judgements – but you’ve got to look at WHAT YOU’RE IN THIS FOR. If all you want is free travel, to bop around the world at someone else’s expense, posting some nice pictures & a few hundred words a week on the stuff you see before you bop on to the next event or next bloggers meet-up – great, enjoy it, the world is full of opportunity and these kinds of chances didn’t exist before. But please get up now and walk out of this room, bc in terms of figuring out a future for travel writing on the web, you’re dead wood, and the rest of us have got more important things to discuss.

So WHAT ARE YOU IN THIS FOR?

Every person here can look in their hearts and know what it is they want to do.

Loving travel, my friends, isn’t good enough. Everyone loves travel – or, everyone loves going to new places, meeting people, seeing stuff, being free from daily routine. But WHAT’S THE POINT? Travel is not a career – we’re here to talk about a career, an industry.

Some ppl love the tech, building things that really work. Some ppl love the design, using a basis of technique to create something that looks beautiful and functions smoothly & elegantly. Some ppl love the images, evoking a place or an emotion through photography. And so on & so on.

And some ppl love the words. They love the feel of them, using them to create something bigger than the sum of its parts, they love weighing them and choosing each one so that it says the right thing in the right way. They are writers.

Again, this is not a value judgement. World needs designers & techie ppl & everybody just as much (probably MORE) than it needs writers.

I’ve had photos full bleed across DPS in global mags, but I KNOW I’M NOT A PHOTOGRAPHER. I couldn’t run a business if you paid me. I’m rubbish at PR. But most of all I don’t even WANT to do any of that. I’m a writer. I want to write.

What are YOU?

You might scoff at the hot metal world of print, but there’s a reason why that whole great corporate world of publishing developed in the way it did

People who were good at business created publishing businesses which made money by giving people things they wanted (or by stimulating demand). But they weren’t writers doing that – writers didn’t know how to. Publishers did. They employed people who were good at accounting to make sure their businesses weren’t losing money. They employed ppl who were good at persuasion to go out & market their products. But the publishers themselves couldn’t write for toffee.

And many of the people now blogging about travel also can’t write for toffee. They’re not writers. They’re really good at all sorts of things – marketing, or business, or tech, or something totally unrelated – but because they need content to work with, they just bang it out themselves.

That’s got two consequences.

It means the internet is full of samey, low-quality travel rubbish.

And it means writers are struggling to find work.

There’s a straightforward way to make money travel blogging – ppl in this room know how – Gary Arndt, Nomadic Matt, talk to Tom Brosnahan, Mike Gerrard

But way they’ve made money, I think, is not from the quality of their writing – again this is NOT a value judgement – it’s from everything BUT the writing – their blogs are generally either a sequence of bite-size personal experiences, informative travel tips, nice pictures, guest posts from others, and so on – but the way they’ve made money from it is through design, SEO, tech skills, advertising, SM promotion – it’s become a business, they’ve treated it like a business.

Unlike me. My blog doesn’t even register – it’s not even a blip – essentially has zero visitors, zero reach, zero everything.

And that’s where most bloggers are, too. Either struggling to bring in a bit of income each month, or essentially given up & gone back to blogging for fun.

And that’s why I’m asking WHAT ARE YOU IN THIS FOR?

If it’s to make money blogging – go ahead, that’s fine, there’s a path to follow, it may take you 2/3/5 years – but you’ll get there. Though you also have to give up the idea that writing well is going to get you there. It won’t. Other skills take priority.

A new idea of the moment – which maybe Jeremy & others will talk about – is, effectively, sponsorship. Travel companies, so the story goes, are realising the value of good writing, so they want to pay people to write for them.

What’s that about? It’s about companies that sell holidays trying to be publishers as well. And that is pretty much exactly the pickle that the mainstream travel press got itself into, when a generation or so ago it began to allow PR and advertisers to dictate travel content. Publishers have become shop-windows for holiday companies. That’s why the weekend travel sections look they way they do currently.

The reason why most of the Western world has a free press is because of a very thin, but very important line – between editorial & advertorial. Editorial is writing paid for by a disinterested publisher. Advertorial is writing paid for by a commercial sponsor. And in virtually every case, advertorial is unadulterated PR.

That’s why I went on about PR earlier on. Erase that line at your peril. Do so, and the world we all work in, the media, dies – it turns into the kind of media that exists in, say, most of the Arab world, or China, or Russia. The tail wags the dog. The media exists only to publish press releases from govt and major corporations.

Some of our mainstream media are already close to that line – not just travel, but fashion, music, all sorts of fields. And on the web, this new idea of travel companies sponsoring content also plays dangerously close to erasing that line. What are the consequences? Readers end up not knowing who to trust – so they stop trusting everybody. That’s part of the reason why newspapers are dying. And it’s also why we have two things in travel – firstly, the idea that all travel writers are corrupt (which leads to this insistence on ‘full disclosure’ and ‘no freebies’), and two, the rise of TripAdvisor and user-generated content as the only content people believe anymore.

You might think that this talk about a free press is getting a bit overblown. But blogging matters. This is not a game. Bloggers like you & me get jailed, or threatened, or killed, in places like Russia, China, Bahrain – and even in holiday places like the Maldives, like Oman, like Malaysia. Some guy in the Maldives, Ismail Rasheed, gets locked up for blogging about being nice to people and you want to take a PR-all-expenses-paid freebie there so you can blog about how great the hotels are? Come on.

So here’s a suggestion. Once a month – or 1 post in 10, whatever you like – go off-piste. Research something non-travel about the place you’re in, and write about it.

You’re going to Texas? Have a great time – then write about the number of people banged up on Death Row.

Switzerland? Brilliant place – do your bungy-jump in Davos, then find out why the Swiss president was forced to apologise to the Jenisch gypsy people who live nearby.

Jordan? Wonderful – but it’s the world’s 4th driest country, so where are all these spa hotels you’re being comped at getting their water from?

Pam Mandel of nerdseyeview went to TBEX in Girona, wandered off into the old quarter, and posted an amazing thoughtful piece about the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. Find it and read it.

What am I saying? I’m saying travel isn’t about you. You’re the filter, but you’re not the story. Add to the sum of human understanding. Be challenging. Be interesting. Like Orwell said, publish things that somebody doesn’t want you to publish.

Writers don’t need commercial sponsors. Writers need publishers. People who know tech, who know design, SEO, marketing, who know online publishing inside out and back to front.

There are hundreds of people – maybe in this room – who know online publishing, but who don’t have the content.

So this is a plea for specialisation.

I’ve always rejected the idea that travel bloggers are a ‘community’ – but if they are, now is the time to show it. Communities don’t have everybody replicating what everyone else is doing. Communities allow people who are good at something to flourish, with the support of that community.

Writers in the room – stop trying to be publishers. Publishers in the room – stop trying to be writers. Designers, forget about taking photos. Photographers, stop trying to do SEO.

If this is a community, then we should be helping each other for mutual benefit. And that doesn’t mean speculative, ‘ooh I’ve got a website, will you write for free?’ It means, making a solid business plan, learn accounting, work the numbers, perhaps even get a start-up loan, pay yourself, and then pay me.

The heyday of travel publishing – back in the early/mid 90s – was when guidebooks & newspapers were producing stuff that was both informative, lifting the lid, AND well-written.

At the moment, travel blogging is all about the former – and the latter is going by the board. That, I think, is limiting its ability to survive.

 So writers you need to get better. Writers often scoff at travel-writing workshops, where you pay £100 to spend a weekend with a pro editor, learning the craft. Don’t scoff. You probably can’t bring someone in off the street and teach them how to write, but you definitely CAN teach a writer how to write about travel. Travel writing is a skill; it’s not hard to learn.

Learn it. Because then you’ll be a better writer. You’ll have higher quality. You’ll have better technique. And technique lets you fly.

You need to be going above & beyond TripAdvisor. “I stayed here & it was great” isn’t good enough. How does it compare to other places? What are its strengths – but WHAT ARE ITS WEAKNESSES? Turn yourself into an EXPLAINER. Don’t just tell me what you’re seeing – TELL ME WHAT IT MEANS. Sift through the mass of personally produced content and professionally produced PR to find – what? I hate to use a journalistic word, but STORIES. We all live or die on stories.

Before your next trip do your research. Find the places and the people who shed light on the destination. And perhaps they’re nothing to do with tourism (in which case the PRs won’t be able to help anyway). Find them. Talk to them. Dig a little.

Be MORE interesting and LESS wide-eyed about the world.

Travel writing for the web is in its infancy. There’s clearly a role for guidebook-style – dispassionate, informative. Guidebooks may be dying, but they are still a multimillion pound industry – people want that stuff. Bloggers – we’re out, on the ground, in every destination in the world. Individually, we flounder; together, we could be selling our expertise for profit. So, let’s collaborate.

But what’s bigger still, in the world of old media, books & magazines? Travel narratives. That’s hundreds of millions of pounds. People can’t get enough. They’re all over TV, radio, books, magazines. People might want information, but they REALLY want professionally produced stories, ideas, inspiration, travel tales.

If we’re a community, let’s work out a way we can give it to them.

In celebration of World Tourism Day on September 27th, entry to tourist sites in Jordan, including Petra, will be free of charge to ALL visitors (NO entry fees on September 27th & 28th).

They linked to this article in the Arabic daily newspaper Al-Rai – owned by the government – which quoted Nayef Al-Fayez, the Minister of Tourism, saying that free admission applied to:

العرب والاجانب والمقيمين

Meaning “Arabs and foreigners and residents” (‘residents’ means citizens of other countries who hold official Jordanian residency).

The announcement – which meant foreign tourists could get into Petra for nothing, saving 55JD (£47/$77) on a two-day ticket – was tweeted widely and posted on travel forums such as TripAdvisor and Couchsurfing.

Fast forward to yesterday, September 27th, and it became apparent that, in fact, foreigners were being charged full price at the gate, and that free admission was being extended only to Jordanians and foreign residents. Mosleh Farajat, who runs the Cleopetra hotel in Petra, had posted the bad news on TripAdvisor (scroll to post 5) on Sept 25th. The minister tweeted it on the 27th.

This morning (Friday 28th), the Jordan Tourism Board twitter feed is buzzing with confusion and disappointment – but they maintain they were not told of the change, and have no further information. I believe them. This is also the weekend in Jordan, so there likely won’t be a resolution until the work week begins on Sunday.

It is, I would say, impossible that AlRai would knowingly allow a ministerial quote to go into print wrongly, or to allow false information to stand uncorrected (that’s a big issue in Jordan right now).

The JTB – which is a public-private body that faces outwards, promoting Jordanian tourism to the world – looks as if it is at fault, but it isn’t: it was only recirculating information from a reliable source.

So what happened?

That TripAdvisor thread, post 7 – written by Patricia Al Hasanat, who runs a B&B in Petra – gives a clue. Bizarre as it may seem, the body which runs Petra (the PDTRA, Petra Development and Tourism Region Authority) is semi-autonomous. Its board of commissioners answer directly to the Prime Minister. They work alongside the Ministry of Tourism, but have no formal links to it, and are not bound by its decisions. (Why is it like that? You may well ask. There are reasons, but not very good ones.)

So here’s my guess as to what happened: two weeks ago the Ministry of Tourism decided to run a World Tourism Day promotion, and let the story out via the media. The JTB picked up the story and publicized it to the world. Meanwhile, down in Petra, the PDTRA decided to opt out – but didn’t tell anybody.

Result? Angry tourists. JTB left to pick up the pieces. A minister out in the cold. And Jordan looks like a mess.

Who will be held accountable?

Frommer concludes by saying that “until…steps are taken by Egyptian officials to discourage such violence, it is clearly unsafe for Americans to visit Egypt as tourists.”

Now, first of all, Morsi had already condemned the violence before Frommer posted his blog. A report here by the AP is timed at 6.18AM ET Thursday, almost five hours before Frommer’s blog went up.

But, regardless, when Frommer conflates a violent minority with a national government, he is playing the extremists’ game for them. As much as the US government cannot be held responsible for the actions of individual filmmakers, the Egyptian government cannot be held responsible for the actions of individual protesters. Frommer should know that. And so should the people throwing rocks in Cairo.

Wiser observers than me have already called the riots “manufactured outrage”: Frommer is quite wrong if he imagines the Egyptian government “whipping up” anything. Quite the reverse: the Egyptian government, for so long the radical opposition (to Mubarak), and unused to power, has rapidly found itself threatened by an even more radical opposition – the Salafis. The Salafis are doing the whipping. And they chose the right date to do it.

And yet, as anyone who has spent any time in Egypt is aware, there’s no need to “whip up” anti-American sentiment. It is overt – and has been for years. In that regard, nothing has changed.

Frommer is right on one thing: the people hate the police. That – rather than religious outrage – is what has been driving the violence in Cairo, as a Foreign Policy editor noted yesterday, four minutes before Frommer blogged. Cairo is in a febrile state, for sure – but to imagine that the unrest is targeted against American tourists is fanciful. Citizens of any country who have a nervous disposition should probably avoid Cairo right now. For others, it’s business as usual (or, in the case of Egypt’s tourism industry, $833m down).

Cairo is one thing. But for Frommer to warn Americans away from the whole of Egypt is unreasonable and unwarranted. There is nothing to suggest that life in the deserts, the Nile tourism towns and the Red Sea resorts is anything other than normal. No warnings against travel to Egypt exist on the US State Dept website or the US Embassy in Cairo website. Is Frommer honestly saying that government travel advisories are not cautious enough?

To plant the idea that the whole of Egypt is unsafe or threatening to American tourists does Frommer’s reputation, and that of his company, no good at all.

The situation may, of course, change rapidly: today is Friday, and things in the Middle East often get out of hand on Fridays. But, at this time of writing, it sounds to me like Mr Frommer’s been watching too much TV news. Perhaps he needs to get out more.

UPDATE: For what it’s worth, a friend in Cairo has tweeted to tell me “All the action is around the embassy. Two streets away you feel nothing, just normal day-to-day life.”

UPDATE 2: I am quoted in this piece by Laura Bly at USA Today.

So I wrote this response, explaining why Cohen is wrong.

Next stop: Michael C. Moynihan for this desperately muddled libertarian froth. Jason Clampet already had a go.

Wish me luck. Better still, anyone else like to step in?

UPDATES (24/08/2012):

UPDATE 1: My response to Nick Cohen was up less than 48 hours before he came back with this even more specious piece, attacking me for a lack of principle – prompting a sharp put-down from a uniquely well-informed observer here.

UPDATE 2: As for Michael Moynihan, he seems to have been making things up. Lonely Planet responded to him directly here, prompting the editors who originally published his piece to issue an end-note correction here. But, like a libertarian dog with an ideological bone, Moynihan then launched into a lengthy, and eye-stretchingly tedious, attempt at a rebuttal here. Enjoy it.

Now I’m not an industry analyst, and I’m not in travel tech, so if you want reasoned, insightful comment, stop reading now and click the links. I’m just a guidebook author. I whinge.

Disclosure: I’ve never written for Frommers. Apart from a bit of freelance editing, in 17 years I’ve never worked for any travel publishers other than Rough Guides.

Back when I started, Rough Guides were huge. They had massive brand recognition in the UK, chiefly on the back of the “Rough Guide to…” TV series – presented most famously by Magenta Devine and Sankha Guha – which ran in the late 80s & early 90s, catching people’s imagination like no TV travel show (arguably, no travel idea in any media) before or since. Lonely Planet had books everywhere, of course, but they were kind of boring, a bit earnest and mundane.

Lonely Planet was Microsoft. Rough Guide was Apple.

Then the Rough Guide founders sold the company to Penguin Books in a two-stage deal, completed in 2002. In ten years since, Penguin killed the brand. Rough Guides went from being a big fish in the small sea of travel publishing to a minnow in the ocean that is the Pearson media conglomerate. Penguin already owned DK, with a huge and globally successful travel brand of its own; RGs became an add-on, with fewer resources and a succession of managing directors who tried to crowbar it into a corporate strategy that was less and less interested in anything that didn’t sell in Jamie Oliver quantities.

Sales reps had bigger fish to fry than the 7th edition of the RG to Farflungistan, so the books – frustratingly, virtually impossible to find outside the UK anyway – began to fade from view in their home market. Cartography and other production processes were hived off to Penguin’s Delhi office: cheaper, but not better. Spinoff pocket guide series came, failed and went. Every year or two came another promise to revamp the RG website to bring it up to LP’s standard; it never happened. RGs remain pretty much invisible online. Ebooks? Digital publishing of any kind? Electronic rights? Negligible.

Those ten years have poleaxed RGs, turning it from a leader into a follower. There’s been a cull of titles, with several dozen 2012/2013 updates “postponed” (read: cancelled): one desperate author has had five of his six titles pulled. The website remains an embarrassment, with the promise of something better to be unveiled, er, sometime soon. The books have been redesigned, though – RGs now feature colour pictures throughout, just like it’s 2003.

The thing that made Rough Guides cool (or, if you prefer, successful) – the voice – has gone. Authors are punch-drunk. Editors are overworked. Even though guidebooks remain trusted (intriguingly, see here for an opposite spin) their raison d’etre has been called into question. What travel brands are cool? None. Content isn’t cool anymore: there’s too much of it.

Devices are cool. Content is just content.

Which is why Google has snapped up Frommers for pennies ($23m). And which is probably why Penguin continues to reckon milking RGs would bring more than selling it – though, as I said at the top, they’ve tried to offload it, to Frommers and also, so I’m told, to a venture capital firm in 2011, who were unimpressed by the offer.

Another industry source tells me there are “people [in the US] who would love to have the Rough Guide brand, if only it didn’t come with so much baggage”.

Penguin has been a disaster for Rough Guides. Remembering RGs in 2002 (and before), and looking at it now, it’s hard to imagine what Penguin could have done worse, short of pulling the plug altogether.

And yet working on one of my titles this year has reminded me how much I love Rough Guides, and just how committed I am to the books. And to guidebooks in general – I’m old-fashioned enough to think that guidebooks can be a force for good, encouraging (and facilitating) the kind of slower, smarter travel that can make a tangible difference to host countries. Guidebooks put power in the hands of consumers in a way that TripAdvisor and 99% of online content providers can’t even begin to grasp.

When the BBC bought Lonely Planet in 2007 – controversial though that was – I allowed myself to daydream about how another dynamic, forward-thinking media outlet with a global reach (and a unique identity as a voice for the world’s marginalised) could compete by injecting new life into a trusted but suffering travel publishing brand. Back then I thought up all sorts of great reasons why Al Jazeera should buy Rough Guides. They didn’t, of course.

So we soldier on. Only now, instead of googling travel and having to wade through reams of SEO’d crud to find anything useful, people are going to see Frommers’ professionally researched and written guidebook material at the top of the list. Why look further?

There’s a massive amount of specialist knowledge and hardcore insight among Rough Guide authors which is, essentially, going begging. Penguin, for whatever reason, cannot or will not exploit it for commercial gain. Is the Google deal curtains for Rough Guides?

Last word to two travel writer friends. First, a prescient author, writing a couple of years ago:

“Guidebook companies should be commissioning thicker, more detailed books. Readers will rely on their excellent content and buy more books. Authors will collect really good information that you can’t find anywhere else, giving the product an edge over competitors that look like their books were done entirely by Google. And this depth of content would give companies an edge online, where a longer tail will bring in more readers by search, and the licensing side can make even more money off selling unique content to partners.”

Amen to that. But to do it would take a leader, not a follower.

Another writer speaks: “Rough Guides? Killer brand, awesome product. Dying a slow death.”

Let us pray.