When the Arab Spring cut short my Middle Eastern travels I looked for stories closer to home. Croatia has always fascinated me : its long history poised between East and West, and latterly the civil wars of the 1990s that so ravaged the countries that make up the former Yugoslavia. So when I received an invitation to Dubrovnik, I jumped at the chance and wrote a small piece for TIME Magazine on one of the hotels there, the Libertas, which offered sanctuary to local villagers during the Serbo-Montenegrin bombardment of the city.
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Iconic War Hotels (al-Jazeera)
In February this year I went to Libya to write about the calm (as it was then), beautiful city of Tripoli. A week after I returned the uprising began, and the hotel I was staying in, the al-Nasr Rixos, became the home – and later the focus – of the world’s media. When the journalists trapped inside had been safely freed, I wrote a story for al-Jazeera on hotels which have become synonymous with the wars, which has just been published.
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Coffee Cups & Facebook Friends (BBC)
My trip to Palestine earlier this year proved a fruitful one, and I came back with many stories to tell. One rather personal story was recently broadcast on the BBC’s ‘From Our Own Correspondent’ (second story), with this intoduction by the BBC’s Alan Johnson:
“You might say that in life, there are few more important things than finding the right person to love. But what’s the best way of doing that? Some say it’s all about personal feelings and romance – and luck letting the right two people meet at just the right time. But others aren’t keen on leaving everything to chance. They would say that with a bit of planning, marriage and love can both be arranged. In many cultures and countries, people are finding their own ways to blend both approaches and take a little from each. For them, both traditional and modern strategies for mate-finding have their advantages. Gail Simmons has been watching one such relationship develop amid the hills of the West Bank.”
(And here’s some more information about the programme, which has been running for over 50 years.)
In May I travelled to Palestine to walk on a new hiking trail there, Abraham’s Path (Masar Ibrahim al-Khalil), and was inspired to write various stories about the experience. One of these, for TIME Magazine, was published today.
In May I travelled to Palestine to walk on a new hiking trail there, Abraham’s Path (Masar Ibrahim al-Khalil), and to find out about opportunities for tourists to experience a Palestine not seen on the conventional Holy Land tour bus circuit. One of my stories on the trip was published today by the al-Jazeera English website.
After trips to Libya, Tunisia and Palestine this year I decided to escape the Arab uprisings and visit Norway. My grandmother was Norwegian, and we’d enjoyed family holidays there, but I hadn’t been to Bergen since I was a child. In an age of increasing homogeneity it was good to visit a place that is so distinctly – well – Norwegian. The Telegraph published my cultural guide to the city.
Jordan is the first country in the Middle East I visited, and for a number of years I led hiking trips there. So when the editor of The Spectator’s new travel supplement asked me to write a piece on adventure travel, I was happy to oblige her with a piece on walking through Jordan.
I’ve recently come back from a trip to Palestine where I was walking on a new hiking trail, Abraham’s Path, and where I stayed with a Palestinian family in the village of Kufr Malek. I was very struck by how the village women were striving to get themselves educated and into the workplace, often earning more than the men. Tourism projects, such as Abraham’s Path, were playing an important part in this.
I spoke about this rise of women in Palestinian society on the BBC World Service programme ‘From Our Own Correspondent‘ (04.40 min into the podcast) on Thursday 26 May. If you’d like to read it, the full text of my piece will shortly be available under this photo of the Bedouin sheikh (in whose tent I also stayed in Palestine).
And if you are based in the UK and want to walk on Abraham’s Path in Palestine, this company can arrange it for you. If you are not in the UK contact this organisation.
I was one of the first British travel journalists to visit Tunisia after the Jasmine Revolution. I travelled to the capital, Tunis, and to the island of Djerba off the Mediterranean coast. This is what I found.
When I was in Tunisia last week I travelled to the Libyan border at Ras Jedir, where I met some of the Tunisian volunteers helping the refugees at the vast camp there. This is the story I wrote for the Al Jazeera English website. Photos by Rama Knight.