Essex Girl's Wet Dream

Dubai. The Palm. The World. The Burj. Land of the 7 star hotel. Home of the world’s largest shopping mall and indoor ski slope. Mecca for Footballer’s Wives wannabes. Chav central. Not my kind of place at all. And yet after a month of Sudan, squalid, maddening, wonderful, impoverished, magical, confusing Sudan, I found myself quite looking forward to my brief stopover in the Emirates. Not least because they have ATMs and accept credit cards. Not least because I’d just lived in a park for two days, hadn’t eaten for three, and had walked five miles out of town to the airport. And not least because I knew I’d hate it. “Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it” goes the old saying; and since I really really wanted to knock it, I supposed I’d have to try it.

My reasons for disliking Dubai are more complex than they might appear at first. “You only want to go to places that no-one else goes to” chorus the cynics. “Dangerous places”. And I can see why they might think that. The only way most westerners would go to the Middle East is with a gun (malfunctioning if they’re British) in their hands and a conscription notice in their back pocket. Sudan is nothing more than genocide and famine in Darfur. Syria is the Axis of Evil. Why on earth would you go there? Plenty of backpackers go to South America on their gap years; very few venture to Colombia – “renowned for drug-fuelled violence” is the shrill cry from the travel mags. But it’s not my fault people believe what they’re told. I don’t go to these places because no-one else goes, it’s merely a side-effect. I like plenty of places on the beaten track: New York, Boston, Miami, Cape Town, Pamplona, Paris, Berlin. But I know I’m going to hate Dubai.

I hated Singapore you see. After three months of relative adventure in India, Nepal, Thailand and Vietnam, I found the surgical precision, the sterilised cleanliness of Singapore stifling rather than satisfying. The only vaguely interesting parts of Singapore are airbrushed facsimiles of somewhere else more real, more exciting, more visceral: Chinatown, Little India, the Arab Quarter. I’d never been to Canary Wharf when I visited Singapore in 2000; only when I arrived at the soulless glass and aluminium outpost in Docklands did I realise the true horror of Singapore. It even has a little toy train to rival the DLR in silliness.

And of course Dubai is all these things, and more. But somehow it’s much worse. Because it’s the future. In a world of rampant commercialism where global corporations are the new imperial powers, Dubai is a shining beacon of what life will be like. Lonely Planet urges visitors to “glimpse the 22nd century in this chaotic, visionary city”. If that’s what 2200 is going to look like, we should all be thanking our lucky stars we won’t be around to see it. Still, in a world where there are over 160 Starbucks branches within 5 miles of Oxford Circus tube station, is it any surprise to see all the usual suspects hanging out on street corners in Dubai? GAP, Nandos, MacDonalds, Burger King, Nike, Apple; Dubai is like some grotesque brand jamboree. It’s just one big American shopping mall. But without any Americans of course.

To be fair, however, for all its rampant commercialisation, Dubai is a little more interesting than Singapore, and a lot more interesting than Canary Wharf, at least in a voyeuristic kind of way. In short, it’s one of the oddest places I’ve ever been. Given that Dubai is the best-known city (though not the capital, that’s Abu Dhabi) in the United Arab Emirates, one might well imagine it’d be more or less an Arab city, with a more or less Arab population. Guess again. While there are a few Arabs in Dubai, their gleaming white dishadashas and red and white checked keffiyehs seeming incongruously exotic as they queue for a half-caf, double-tall, non-fat, extra-hot chai latte to go, before driving off in a gleaming Porsche Cayenne, the vast majority of the population is no more Arab than you are. This I discovered when I hailed a taxi at the airport in neighbouring Sharjah, and found myself totally unable to understand the driver’s Arabic. Not even ‘hello’. When he excitedly turned up the radio to listen to updates from the India-Pakistan Test match as we sat in traffic, I suddenly realised. Like so many others here, he’s a “guest worker”.

Everyone in Dubai is a guest worker, or an expat. The natives are seldom seen, probably because they’re at home counting their petrodollars or working out how best OPEC can screw the rest of the world just that little bit more. For Dubai is the second-biggest oil producer in the UAE (again, the winner is Abu Dhabi) and the country as a whole allegedly has the third largest oil reserves in the world. Yet oil accounts for a staggeringly small 6% of Dubai’s GDP; by 2010 this will fall below 1% as the property and tourism boom continues apace. Countless eulogising articles in the Western financial press speak of the “Dubai economic miracle” and wonder aloud, “how do they do it?”

The answer is surprisingly simple, as one perceptive (but not that perceptive) article suggests cryptically: “in a globalised knowledge economy it will be the ability to deliver the lowest costs of skilled labour that mark out the winners - and Dubai is already there.” Yes, low-cost labour is the key. Exceedingly low-cost labour. It’s a brilliantly simple, brilliantly original idea. Except of course it’s not that original at all. Slavery is as old as human history. The Pharaohs, the Romans, the Brits, the Americans, the Nazis. All the great empires have been based on slavery. And also the current government of Sudan. Ship “workers” from their homeland to where you need them, forbid them from leaving, and then force them to toil in appalling conditions for a hundred hours a week. And there are hundreds of thousands here, from south Asia, from the Philippines, and from east Africa. They have no rights, no unions, in many cases no passports (these are often confiscated by their employers on arrival), and are paid peanuts to live and work in dreadful conditions. But who cares? The hotels are great, property prices are booming, they have guaranteed Winter sun, and there’s a bloody great snow dome in one of the shopping malls. Chavtastic!

Which brings me onto the next issue. Tourists. Now generally, as you know, I dislike tourists. Loud, obnoxious, inappropriately-dressed, stupid. Yes, I dislike them mostly because they remind me so much of myself. Nothing ruins your ludicrous Lawrence of Arabia, man of the people, intrepid adventurer fantasy like tripping over a family of fatsos from Milton Keynes getting third degree sunburn as they walk topless (all of them) around the streets of Cairo or Istanbul. And I thought I’d seen some appalling tourists before. Then I went to Dubai. As Colonel Kurtz famously whispered, “the HORROR, the HORROR”. It’s a nightmarish vision of a dystopian future. It’s like waking up to Beethoven’s Fifth and suddenly realising you’re in A Clockwork Orange. It’s hideous. It’s as if Marx has been updated for the 21st (or 22nd) Century. The Chavist Manifesto. “Shirkers of the world: unite.” But it’s worse than that. Because they’re all here. From all over Britain. From all over the world.

And then there are the hookers. Because this is a Muslim country (believe me, I had to double-check that fact), alcohol is unavailable outside hotel bars. But since every other building in Dubai is a hotel, and every hotel has at least two bars, this isn’t exactly the Volsted Act. As I sat in my hotel bar, perusing the food menu, I didn’t pay too much attention to the scantily-clad girls gathered in a dark corner, until one of them made eyes at me as she walked past my table. She had that quintessentially Slavic look: ugly, thin (but thin in a manner that suggests an impoverished upbringing rather than a genetic predisposition or long hours in the gym), and appallingly dressed. Still I didn’t work out she was a pro. Until, that is, she left the bar and went upstairs with a portly middle aged Arab gentleman in a dishadasha. For the third time in an hour. It was like one of those Magic Eye posters in vogue in the 90s. After staring for so long at the wood, you suddenly realise you can see the trees. They were everywhere. I went to a couple of different hotels just to check. Same story. Russian whores. Everywhere. Singapore has the infamous "Four Floors of Whores", Dubai has every hotel in town. Of course with Russian prossies go Russian pimps. Heavy-set men with shaven heads, leather jackets, and menacing eyes that suggest a promising career in the FSB sadly curtailed by the inadvertent irradiation of a west London sushi restaurant or a massacre of Chechen dissidents, broadcast live on CNN. They’re terrifying. But like all good horror movies, you just can’t take your eyes off them. Of course when the alternative is endless Paris Hilton wannabes from Chelmsford, that's not entirely surprising I guess.

So I wouldn’t exactly recommend Dubai as a dedicated holiday destination. But as a stopover at least, it has its charms. Just not as a stopover on the way to the Maldives or Australia or anywhere nice. No, Dubai is best experienced as a stopover on the way home from the Third World. 72 hours since you last ate? A month since your last non-felafel-based meal? Nandos peri-peri chicken is perfect. Find your minimum standards for a place to sleep have slipped a bit: “there’s not too much goat shit there, and I haven’t seen any snakes around here”? A city with 5 star hotels for seventy quid a night is ideal. Yes, if you’ve just finished a season of aid work in Afghanistan, are on your way home from a trip to see the guerrillas (or gorillas) in the Democratic Republic of Congo, or have recently been released after fourteen years chained to a radiator in a Beirut cellar by those nice chaps from Hizballah, by all means head to Dubai for some well deserved r&r. But otherwise don’t bother stopping. Of course none of this applies if you’re from Essex, view Hello magazine as anything other than emergency barbeque fuel, or want to fly thousands of miles to go snowboarding inside a shopping mall in the middle of the fucking desert. In which case you should by all means go to Dubai. And stay there.

Selling The Big Issue In Khartoum

When I was 17, I rather foolishly went to see the then recently re-released horror film The Exorcist at the cinema at midnight on Halloween. I was so terrified I had to stop the car on the way home and chain-smoke a couple of a friend's cigarrettes just to stop my hands from shaking. I slept with the lights on for about a week. Though I own the film on dvd and have watched it dozens of times, it still never fails to scare me senseless.

With this in mind then, imagine my horror when my Sudanese dive trip concluded with noxious green liquid began oozing from my aural cavity. This delightful discharge was accompanied by the kind of searing pain I'd only previously encountered in hospital beds shortly before some kindly nurse began dishing out the intravenous opiates. While I was almost certain I was not the victim of diabolic possession, I was undeniably in some considerable discomfort. Such discomfort, in fact, that I was forced to take my life in my hands and take drastic measures indeed. I went to the doctors in Sudan.

Given the quality of food, hotels, roads (not to mention the prison cells) in Sudan, this was certainly not an adventure upon which I embarked lightly. Maybe it is evidence of how far the NHS has fallen on hard times, or perhaps my negative experiences of the British medical system are skewed because of my long residence in 3rd world east London, but I was pleasantly surprised by my exposure to Sudanese primary care. Admittedly my waiting time was reduced somewhat by my skin colour and nationality (a not uncommon example of the positive discrimination which is often experienced as a white man abroad), not to mention the fifty dollar bill in my hand, but the service was exceptional. The doctor spoke impeccable English, superior certainly to that of anyone in my own GP's surgery in Bow (not once did he say "innit"), his office was spotlessly clean, and the equipment included a striking array of shiny new plasma screen monitors on which I was able to view the live ultrasound of a young Beja tribeswoman taking place behind a curtain. (While the Qu'ran clearly forbids both craven images of living things and women from showing uncovered skin in public, I'm not at all sure of the ruling on random passers-by staring intently at digital images of a foetus swimming around the womb.)

I'm not sure either whether the doctor had seen Linda Blair's fluourescent green oozings in the scariest film of 1973, but his reaction upon peering into my ear was certainly similar to my response to The Exorcist. For a second I was tempted to grab the crucifix from his wall and do something unspeakable while exclaiming " fuck me Jesus!", just to see what'd he say, but the urge thankfully passed. According to the good doctor (as the sign above his desk proudly annoucned, the esteemed recipient of a "degree from the prestigious University of Khartoum") no less) I was not the victim of Satanic visitation after all, but in fact had an ear infection of some unusual severity, for which he prescribed a rockstar-esque cocktail of potions and pills.

And here's where the trouble started. Due to a US trade embargo dating from the Khartoum government's rather ill-advised decision to back Saddam Hussein in the Mother of All Battles in 1991, Sudan is not connected to the international banking system. There are no international ATMs or credit card machines in the country; even the Khartoum and Port Sudan Hiltons only accept payment in hard currency. Consequently visitors must carry all funds necessary for the duration of their visit in cash, and hope that they don't become an unfortunate exception to Sudan's generally negligible crime rate and scrupulously honest people. I myself spent the first two and a half weeks of my stay carrying the best part of two thousand dollars, in fifty dollar bills, in a money belt down my trousers. However, having spent most of that on my dive trip, I was left with a mere $150 for my last three days. After forking out $50 for a bus ticket back to Khartoum, $50 for a doctor's appointment and a $39 dollar charge for medicines was not exactly ideal.

And thus, with $11 to survive on for three days, I found myself sneaking into the Blue Nile Sailing Club in the dead of night, and unfurling my sleeping bag on the lawn. While camping is a generally-accepted holiday and leisure pastime, it usually involves one or both of a) a tent and b) a rural location. People who spend nights in sleeping bags in parks are usually described as "homeless" rather than "camping", though to my shame I must admit it's not the first time I've slept rough in an urban setting. (NB: getting shit-faced and trying to find a hotel room in Brighton at 4am on a Bank Holiday weekend is not a good idea. Nor is trying to sleep on a gravelly beach when the tide is coming in, nor indeed is attempting to find repose in a "secluded" corner of a 24 hour convenience store, using a family size packet of dried pasta as a pillow.) At least the Sudanese don't much care where you sleep - given the extraordinary heat, many of them pull their beds into the street anyway. Unfortunately the downside of the balmy tropical nights which make outdoor sleeping so pleasant in Sudan are the scorching daytime temperatures, which meant that all of my precious $11 (yes, I survived 72 hours on just over a fiver at the prevailing dollar-sterling exchange rate) was spent on liquid refreshment. Say what you want about the evils of global capitalism, but when the mercury is pushing 45 degree Centigrade, the ability to procure an ice-cold bottle of Pepsi in deepest darkest Africa should not be underestimated.

Accordingly, I spent my last evening in Sudan, literally penniless, enjoying a 5 mile stroll through the southeastern suburbs of the capital to Khartoum International Airport. I'm not sure I can pay more glowing a tribute to the hospitality, friendliness, and honesty of the good people of Africa's largest country than to say I was able to sleep in a park for two nights, leave all my possessions under a tree for two whole days, and then wander aimlessly through the outlying slums of the capital with no danger my health or wellbeing whatsoever. It might be a total shithole with minimal infrastructure and precious little of interest to actually see, but of the forty or so countries I have visited in all corners of the globe, Sudan must rank as the safest and friendliest, bar none. Which sort of begs the question of how and why they've spent almost the entire fifty years since independence committing bloody genocide against each other. But that's another story...

Sudan: Pyramids, Permits, Porridge

The police officer grabs my arm roughly and tries to drag me behind him. Being Arab, rather than African, he's extremely short in stature and I tower over him. I resist. He shouts roughly in Arabic - I don't catch the exact meaning, but the sense is clear. He squeezes my arm tighter, so tight I can feel his nails digging in and drawing blood. For a second I consider smashing his face with my fist - perhaps wisely, I restrain myself. He pulls himself up to his full height, around 5 foot 5, and brings his face very close to mine. I mime as if to bite his nose, and he backs off, cowering in fear. "Inta mejnoon, inta mejnoon", he shouts in Arabic - "You are crazy, you are crazy", and unmistakably mimes a handcuffing maneouvre. My German travelling companions, Peter and Tariq, laugh contemptuously at him. "There's nothing he can do, we have done nothing wrong", says Peter, grinning. For all my external bravado I don't quite share his optimism, in fact I feel quite frightened. We are, after all, under arrest in Sudan.

Ah, Sudan. In his epic account of the British reconquest of the Sudan in 1898, With Kitchener to Khartoum, the Victorian journalist G.W. Steevens memorably described the country as "a God-accursed wilderness, an empty limbo of torment for ever and ever". The ancient Egyptians knew it simply as "Kush" - "the wretched"; both are descriptions with which I have more than a little sympathy. In many ways Sudan is exactly as might be expected: very big, very hot, very dusty, and very poor. The roads are awful. The hotels are awful. The food is awful. The bureaucracy is simply staggering. Barring a few broken down pyramids scattered across the desert, there isn't even much in the way of things to see. And yet...

When locals engage travellers in conversation, which they do with an incredible regularity, one of the first questions they ask is invariably, "why are you here?". This is usually followed by a verbatim regurgitation of the country's well-publicised ills: poverty, war, government-sponsored genocide, famine and the like. The question is quite a difficult one to answer - and one I have asked myself regularly in the last ten days, usually following a muttered exhortation of "fucking Sudan".

Yet Sudan is charming. It might take ten hours to travel 100 miles, it might be impossible to eat anything except felafel and laughing cow cheese, and it might need two hours a day just to negotiate the bureaucratic jungle of travel permits, photo permits, security registration, and army checkpoints, but... Sudan is like a woman who plays hard to get. Coquettish, manipulative, evasive, sometimes downright unpleasant, but every so often, just as all patience is finally being exhausted, she does something so beautiful, alluring, and beguiling that she reels you right back in again.

And so it proved with the saga of my arrest in the exquisitely-named town of "Dongola". The town itself sits on the west bank of the Nile, while its bus station is on the east; the two are linked by a small ferry. Upon arrival at the bus station the previous day, I had simply boarded the waiting ferry and crossed. After a couple of hours jumping through hoops at the town's security office, I had the requisite permits to stay in town, and was able to check in to a hotel and go about my business unmolested. Leaving, however, was a different story. A jumped-up little man with a moustache (why do third world government officials always have a moustache?) demanded a permit. Sensing a scam - aside from the previous day's successful ferry crossing without any such permit, he wore no uniform and carried no identification - I ignored him and boarded the ferry.

Enter another jumped-up little man with a moustache, a hugely umpleasant-looking growth on his cheek, and the light blue uniform of the Sudanese police. I was in no mood to cooperate with him, and his aggressive demeanour and physical man-handling did not help matters. Upon reaching the east bank of the Nile we were hauled off to a nearby police station, harangued in Arabic (which for once I made great theatre of not speaking a single word of) and intimidated by a very public production of handcuffs and a tour of the cells - all the while my assailant bristling with indignation in the margins, strange growth quivering with unrestrained outrage.

Finally an English speaker was produced. This man was not an official, merely a bystander from the nearby market who has been commandeered to act as an interpreter. In full earshot of the assembled police and army officers, who, unusually for heavily anglophone Sudan, did not understand a word, he offered reassurances.

"I am sorry you have been treated like this. You see what we must deal with from our government? You must have a permit to cross the Nile - without it you cannot board the ferry. If you do not argue, accept the permit, you will be released. If you do not, they will keep you here. This will be bad for you I think."

Despite the fact that this would indeed be "bad for you", my German companions and I were not to be placated so easily, however.

"But yesterday we crossed the Nile on this exact fucking ferry, without a permit. So what the fuck are you talking about?"

"Ah but that was crossing east to west. For this you need no permit. Crossing west to east is a different story. For this you must have permit. I am sorry. You must wait here, the man with the permits will come from the office in Dongola, and you will go with him back to the office, to get a permit."

The man duly arrived, half an hour later, permits in hand. Could he not just issue the permit there and then, to save us two more crossings of the river, one with permit, one without? Of course not. That would be unforgivable. We must accompany him back to his office forthwith. Peter, who has not been to Venezuela, took his turn to vent his feelings of disgust at Sudan's Monty Pythonesque bureaucracy:

"This is the worst country I have ever been to. This is just ridiculous. We will return to Europe and tell everyone how terrible Sudan is and no-one else will come here. Why do you victimise us like this?"

Our interpreter just smiled sadly and shrugged.

"This is the Sudanese government, not the Sudanese people"

An hour later, permits in hand, and fresh from a lecture from the chief of police about the extreme danger of crossing the Nile from west to east without a permit (presumably he was not referring to the likelihood of assault by his officers, though that appeared the only remotely dangerous aspect of the crossing to me), we approached the ferry ticket office, muttering curses on Sudan and all its ridiculousness. Our interpretor appeared from nowhere, and in a stroke reminded us of what's so great about this country.

"I am so sorry for what has happened. I have bought your ferry tickets for you. Please do not think badly about Sudan and its people."

How could I disagree?

Sahara

I sit on the crest of a giant hill, watching the far-off orange disk of the sun sink below the horizon. As far as the eye can see, in every direction, is nothing but the purest white sand imaginable, formed into huge undulating dunes like the roiling surface of the ocean. Once again I experience the eerie silence of the desert. Aside from our trusty Toyota Landcruiser, not a single sign of life is visible. This is the largest expanse of sand on earth: 2.8 million square kilometres of vast, desolate emptiness. The ancient Egyptians knew it simply as deshret, or "red land". The Arabs call it Sahara. We use both names: this is the Sahara Desert.

It's perhaps fitting that the generic Arabic word for desert, "Sahara", has come to refer in English specifically to the great desert that spans the width of north Africa. As the British explorer Ralph Bagnold observed in Libyan Sands, the Sahara, and particularly the Egyptian Sahara, is the greatest expanse of desert on the planet: "There are deserts and there are deserts. But the Western Desert, a vast expanse that starts at the western banks of the Nile and continues well into Libya is the desert of deserts."

Like the visceral fear that gripped me as I flew over the endless expanse of green of the Amazon, I find the sheer scale of the Sahara queasily un-nerving. It's disconcerting enough to be unable to see anything beyond the endless repetitious dunes in all directions, but the knowledge that in some directions the landscape continues in this vein for a thousand miles is truly terrifying. I don't stray far from the Landcruiser driven by our affable Berber guide, Ibrahim; though the way he pilots the vehicle up and down seemingly sheer walls of sand does little for my nerves. He laughs at his passengers' obvious concern, and with a couple of silent prayers to Allah we're off again, careering across the sand at an improbable angle, trying to build up sufficient speed to mount the crest of the next vertical dune. I'm starting to understand why it's called the Great Sand Sea, as it's all rather reminiscent of The Perfect Storm, though with sand instead of water, and a grinning nomad in a keffiyeh in place of George Clooney.

I visited the Great Sand Sea from the small oasis town of Siwa, close to Egypt's western border with Libya. Despite its incredibly remote location, Siwa has an ancient history dating back to Pharaonic times, when it was famed as the site of the omniscient Oracle of Amun. After invading Egypt in 525BC, the Persian king Cambyses sent an army 50,000 strong to take Siwa and destroy the Oracle, which had - presciently as it turned out - predicted his imminent demise; in a mystery which endures to the present day, the entire force was simply swallowed up by the vast emptiness of the desert and never heard from again. Following his own conquest of Egypt in 332BC, the legendary Macedonian General Alexander the Great made a personal pilgrimage to Siwa, where he was acclaimed by the local priests as the son of a god. In this respect Alexander was a little more successful than a certain Jesus of Nazareth; unlike the rest of the country, Christianity never reached this remote corner of Egypt. Though it did eventually fall to Islam, Siwa's remoteness ensured its unique culture, religion and language endured.

In many respects Siwa is more akin to Libya than Egypt: the people here are Berbers rather than Arabs, and while most locals speak at least some Arabic (certainly more than me), the Berber dialect of Siwi is still very much the lingua franca. Such is Siwa's remoteness in fact, the oasis was only connected to the rest of Egypt by road in the mid-1980s. In many respects Siwa's isolation allows it to exist in a timewarp of mudbrick houses, donkey carts, and candlelight; a display about local culture in the Tourist Office features the immortal phrase: "before the coming of television in 1988".

Siwa is very much an African, rather than Egyptian town, with a grinding poverty the like of which I can scarcely recall seeing before. Although I have now returned, briefly, to Cairo and the Middle East, my sojourn in Siwa very much set the tone for the rest of my journey: I depart tonight by sleeper train to Aswan, from where I will sail across Lake Nasser, bound for Africa. The Sudan.

Moses, Mohammed & The Mother of the World

"It's always the same in Egypt isn't it? Always baksheesh? It's not like this in other Arab countries - Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine - only in Egypt. I think perhaps there must be some problem with the people here - why are they like this? Perhaps they are keffirs?"

The massed ranks of the black berets, white uniforms, and starched moustaches of the "Egyptian Tourist and Antiquities Police" stare at me in angry disbelief. They are almost as surprised by my tirade in Arabic as I am. By the looks of things I managed to communicate my meaning clearly enough, though I'm beginning to think that accusing these officers of being keffirs - unbelievers - was perhaps a bit much. It's easy to detect a devout Muslim in Egypt; the purple-black bruising on their foreheads attests to some committed and regular time kneeling on a prayer mat. Still, I'm pretty sure that these officials are trying to steal from me, and going by the Book (all three Books in fact) at least, that would make them unbelievers. "Thou shalt not steal". (Exodus 20:15)

The towering rocky outcrop of Mount Sinai, believed to be the site at which Moses received the Ten Commandments from God, has long been a destination of pilgrimage - for Jews, Muslims and Christians - from all over the world. Now, however, the vast majority of pilgrims are of a distinctly secular bent. With charter flights from all corners of Europe and ludicrously cheap all-inclusive hotel deals, the Sinai Peninsula has become a veritable Mecca for the sort of tourists that generally make me shudder. In opting to climb Sinai at sunset, instead of sunrise, I was hoping to miss out not only on grotesquely half-naked gargoyles from Eastern Europe, but also the kind of sleazy local rip-off merchants who habitually follow them. Now, however, it seemed I would be thwarted by the mustachioed dimwits of the Egyptian Tourist Police, who insisted I hire a "Bedu guide" for 50 Egyptian Pounds. Given the state of some of the large blubbery mammals staggering out of the gates after successfully completing the climb, I was highly sceptical about my need to be accompanied, particularly by a walking cliche machine who would doubtless try to foist upon me any number of stuffed camels, "traditional" jewellery, and other such tat, all at "special prices". So I protested some more.

"Look, he's clearly not a fucking Bedu, and I don't need a fucking guide. Just let us go."

While Arabic is undoubtedly a beautiful, expressive, poetic language, some things are just better said in good old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon. Unfortunately this did little to calm the situation. At this point reason, in the form of a nice young Australian girl with whom I have a, shall we say, "passing acquaintance", stepped in.

"James, this really isn't helping matters, and it is only five quid after all..."

I demurred, and off we walked, our by now very frightened Bedu guide Mohammed keeping a safe distance ahead, and casting the odd furtive glance back to check he wasn't in mortal danger. Of course he was an authentic Bedu, about as authentic as it gets in fact, and a thoroughly nice bloke too. For four hours I had a free Arabic conversation partner with whom I could discuss the three topics closest to every man's heart, namely politics, sex, and football (possibly not in that order). Upon reaching the summit we found it blissfully free of Lithuanian bodybuilders, beach towel-toting Germans and alcoholic Brits, with only the slightly deranged hymn-singing of a group of French Christians to disturb the spiritual peace.

Down at sea level, it was a different story. Sinai is a veritable paradise for hotel developers, and hell on earth for anyone with a backpack. While the tourists are distasteful, many of the locals are just appalling. I can quite understand the negativity of anyone whose opinion of Egyptians, and Arabs in general, is based on experiencing the awful hassle prevalent in the Sinai Peninsula. Since my first visit to Cairo eighteen months ago, I have fought a largely unsuccessful battle to persuade friends, family and colleagues of the inherent friendliness and hospitality of the Egyptian people. After visiting Nuweiba, Dahab, and Mount Sinai - which together with the abominable Sharm el Sheikh is the extent of most people's experience of Egypt - I can understand why people are so reluctant to believe me. Indeed, I even began to doubt myself. Could Cairo live up to my rose-tinted recollections of drinking tea and smoking sheesha in scenic backstreets with charming, friendly and unfailingly hospitable locals?

The answer is equivocal. While the hassle factor around the heavily-visited Pyramids, Egyptian Museum and Khan al-Khalili Bazaar is undeniably immense, away from the tourist traps the "Mother of the World", as Cairo is known here, is still a wonderful wonderful place. The overcrowding is chronic: 20 million people living in what is, in parts, the most densely-populated area on Earth, and the pollution is appalling: at this time of year especially the city is shrouded in a dense brown carpet of smog. The traffic is simply incredible: crossing the road in Cairo is an adrenaline sport to match anything I have ever experienced: bull-running, skydiving, swimming with sharks, none can come close to the terror of stepping into the streets of Egypt's capital.

Yet for all its undoubted faults, the "Arab Manhattan" (as one Australian I know referred to it) still has some incredible sights, a magical atmosphere, and some of the friendliest people I've encountered anywhere. For all the glory of its museums, ancient mosques and Pharaonic monuments, my abiding memory of Cairo will always be the side of the city that the hotpant-wearing, camel-toe showing package tourists never witness [for pictures of Russian girl with camel toe outside Egyptian Museum, click link to "Egypt" photos above right]. Sitting in a sidestreet drinking tea and smoking sheesha, the gentle bubbling of the waterpipe and the staccato clatter of dominoes competing with the cacophanous soundtrack of car engines, never-ending horns, and the sound of twenty million people taking time out from their daily lives to practise the only English they know: "Hello. Welcome."

The Sound of Silence

I sit in a Bedu tent, made of goatskin and old sacks, drinking tea. As the sun sets, the desert air cools rapidly, and we huddle closer to the camp fire. The wind howls, our resting camels low softly in the distance, but otherwise there is only silence. Despite my limited Arabic, and the limited English of my guide, Suleiman, I chat with our hosts in their immaculate white robes and red and white chequered headdresses. Their questions are endearingly naive.

"Are there Bedu in your country? Deserts? Trees? Birds?"

Each answer is considered carefully, as if it were the sage advice of a prophet, rather than the observations of a slightly scruffy backpacker. Then the line of questioning switches from my far off exotic homeland to my suddenly not-so- personal life. How long am I travelling for? Where is my wife? How many children do I have? With the aid of Suleiman, who as a guide has been exposed to Westerners before and obviously knows a little of their strange ways, I explain that I am unmarried, that in the West people tend to marry later, that I have no children. This is greeted with sceptical laughter.

But what of, ahem, sex? Suleiman and I explain about the concept of girlfriends, dating, pre-marital sex. My audience sits in stunned silence. It's clear that despite their mobile phones and pickup trucks, their exposure to Western culture has been exceedingly limited. They look at me as if I had just told them I'd been to the moon. (As that particular heavenly body illuminates the sand, I briefly consider telling them about Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. After some reflection I decide not to - I fear my credibility would evaporate instantly). Slowly a sly grin creeps across the faces of the younger ones as the implications of sex before marriage become apparent. I feel guilty. As they trudge piously away from the fire to pray, I feel a bit like the serpent in the Garden of Eden.

As Suleiman - he does not pray - and I sit in silent contemplation of the odd exchange in which we just participated, an ancient radio set hums quietly. I cannot understand the dialogue from the chat programme, but the music is familiar enough. As if to emphasise the surrealness of the situation, the unmistakable saxophone notes of Kenny G drift across the sands. I cannot contain my laughter. Dinner is served in traditional style. A communal bowl of sticky rice into which we all dip our (right) hands, fashioning a handful of rice into a congealed ball with the fingertips, before gracefully consuming without a hint of spillage. At least that's what the Bedu do; in no time at all I closely resemble an autistic five year old let loose on a rice pudding, with a sticky mess all over my face, hand, and lap. Everyone politely pretends not to notice.

I had long hoped to meet some "non-Westernised" Bedu, and here, in the red desert of southern Jordan, I found them. Suleiman and I had travelled alone, by camel, for two days to reach them. Wadi Rum is not particularly remote and many toursits visit every day. Yet the overwhelming majority do so by 4 wheel drive; early on our first morning we saw literally dozens of them roaring past us, slowing down briefly to take photos of the two eccentrics riding fully laden camels, now in the 21st Century. Part of me wished I was wearing Bedu robes instead of khaki trousers for the full Lawrence of Arabia effect.

Once they had screeched past us in some crazy catch-me-if-you-can race from sight to sight, Suleiman and I settled down to the gentle rhythm of travel by camel. We spoke little, often sharing no more than a couple of words for hours. Suleiman confided in me that he only travels in the desert by camel - he hates large groups of people and goes to the desert in search of silence and solitude. And, oh, what silence there is to be found in the desert. On our first night, having not seen another soul for the best part of six hours, we made camp in the shade of some giant red boulders. After unsaddling the camels and collecting firewood, I scrambled up the rocks to get a better view of the fast-approaching sunset while Suleiman set about preparing dinner. As the sun sank lower in the sky, the already vivid colours of the desert were tinged first orange, then red, and finally purple. Darkness came quickly, and soon an impressive canopy of stars illuminated the cloudless night sky

After a simple enough dinner of rice, potatoes, and bread (Dr Atkins would clearly not approve of Bedu living), washed down with gallons of sweet black tea, we settled in for the evening. As I lay in my sleeping bag on a mattress of desert sand I stared up at the sky and listened to the deafening, echoing silence of the night. As a habitual city-dweller I had always imagined that the phrase "the sound of silence" was a product of Simon and Garfunkel's drug-addled minds; a function of LSD or pot, or coke or whatever else long-haired types with guitars were dropping, smoking or snorting back in the Sixties. Yet at Wadi Rum I finally registered what they were talking about. Granted, it could perhaps have been something to do with the the thick clouds of distinctly "herbal" smoke drifting from the quietly grinning Suleiman, but I like to think it was something more profound.

Of course, the pursuit of silence, solitude and the elusive Bedu were not my only motivations in trekking from Rum to Aqaba by camel. T.E. Lawrence, the enigmatic, almost mythical figure immortalised in David Lean's epic film, Lawrence of Arabia, famously made the same journey in 1917. Unlike Lawrence I was not accompanied into town by a legion of irregular Arab cavalry; nor did I in fact arrive in Aqaba on my trusty humped steed, instead hitch-hiking the last few kilometres into town in the flatbed of a pickup truck driven by a pious family heading home to Saudi Arabia. Yet in some small way I liked to think of myself as following in Lawrence's footsteps.

One of the most enigmatic and most-romaticised figures in modern history, "El Awrens" as he was know in Arabic, made his name by living with the Bedu, speaking their language, adopting their customs, wearing their clothes. By virtue of his acceptance by the Arab leaders, Lawrence was able to assist, advise or lead (depending on who you ask) the Arab Revolt against Ottoman Turkish rule during the First World War, securing a legendary reputation for himself, and in the process doing a great deal to ensure an Allied victory over the Axis Powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Ottoman Turkey. Lawrence's promises of Arab independence, subsequently broken by the Allied governments at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 (much to Lawrence's disgust), still haunt the Middle East today as the artificially-constructed states of Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan, Palestine, Syria and Lebanon, struggle to maintain their existence.

More than once the Bedu remind me of the total artificiality of the national borders in this region, replying with a shrug when I asked where they are from. "Some call it Saudia, some call it Jordan. We call it the desert." Theirs is a tough existence, eked out from some of the harshest conditions on earth; indeed, T.E. Lawrence famously called it "a death in life". Yet as I lay down in the sand, gazed up to the heavens, and listened once more to the awesome, deafening roar of total uninterrupted silence, I found myself starting to dread the return to civilisation. As the great desert explorer Wilfred Thesiger wrote in Arabian Sands: "No man can live this life and emerge unchanged. He will carry, however faint, the imprint of the desert, the brand which marks the nomad; and he will have within him the yearning to return, weak or insistent according to his nature. For this cruel land can cast a spell which no temperate clime can match." I know what he meant.

Roses Are Red

It's often said that prostitution is the oldest profession in the world. While I can't comment on that, after my visit to Petra I can definitely confirm that the art of striptease has a venerable pedigree indeed.

As you saunter down the Siq, the two and a half kilometre long narrow canyon that leads to the ancient rose red Nabatean city, the excitement builds to a new crescendo with each twist and turn. "It's round the next corner, I'm sure", and still, no, no sign of the famous Treasury. And again, "It's round the next corner, I'm sure", and still no. Then, just as bemusement is replacing anticipation, "where can it be?", suddenly there is a glimpse of naked red rock, in the unmistakable form of the left breast of Al Khazneh - the Treasury - familiar from a thousand photos, not to mention the climatic scenes of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. More tantalising glimpses are revealed through the Siq's lacy lingerie, then suddenly you are there, the canyon sheds the last of it's clothing and the canyon opens out to reveal the glory of the Treasury. The Full Monty as it were.

Jordan's number one tourist attraction was recently voted one of the "New Seven Wonders of the World", placing it in such illustrious company as the Taj Mahal, the Coliseum, and Machu Picchu. Of those three, only Machu Picchu can rival Petra for sheer spectacle; while I have not yet visited the others: Chichen Itza, Christ the Redeemer, or the Great Wall of China, I'm not sure any of those sites could come close to the rose red city. For while the Treasury's much- photographed delights capture all the plaudits, the city itself is breathtaking in scale: a vast collection of ruins, the majority directly carved, somewhat improbably, from the series of remote desert canyons and mountains in which Petra is so spectacularly situated.

It would take days to explore the site in its entirety; as well as the size of the place, the heat, the dust, and the steep inclines make it a foreboding place to visit. To avoid the worst of the environment, not to mention the enormous crowds, I made an early start, and was at the Treasury just before 6am. For ten glorious minutes I was totally alone, contemplating the giant facade of columns, urns, and statues in absolute awe. The silence was deafening, eerie; I was alone with the ghosts of the mysterious and long-vanished Nabatean Empire. It was a magical, almost spiritual experience.

And then, the spell was broken. A busload of Slovak tourists arrived, loudly chattering and giggling, reeking of sunscreen, cheap perfume, and the strange canned meats seemingly so beloved of all inhabitants of post-Communist bloc countries. I fled at a brisk pace, actually breaking into a run at one point, and after an hour or so of merely passing contemplation of ruins of such glory as to put the whole of Turkey's wealth of archaeological treasures totally in the shade, eventually reached the Monastery, at Petra's remote northern reaches. Situated high on a bleak mountainside, and blessed with spectacular views over the mountains and desert to Israel in the west, the Monastery is every bit as breath-taking as the Treasury, and that much more special for its relative inaccessibililty to the roaming hordes of tour groups that throng most of Petra each day.

Alas, such is the popularity of the site with travelling halfwits, that Petra is also overrun with "enterprising" locals of the sort who have memorised every tourist pickup line in fourteen different languages. With such gems as "lubbly jubbly" (I say it again, has any Brit, except Del Boy Trotter, ever actually said this phrase?), "Asda price", and "cheap as chips", how could I resist? Resist beating them to death with my dog-eared Lonely Planet, that is.

Still, some poor unfortunates from Mexico fell for the Spanish sales patter, and promptly handed over (I know, because I sat and watched them, in open-mouthed awe) US$150 for a necklace of such staggering tackiness and low grade craftsmanship that it is by now certainly lying forgotten in a wastebin somewhere between Amman and Mexico City. The self-styled "Bedu" (who incidentally have about as much in common with the semi-mythical desert nomads after whom they shamelessly name themselves as I do) could barely contain their mirth at getting away with this outrageous piece of daylight robbery.

The sellers aren't the only ones making a killing at Petra either. The local young men, dark skinned and long-haired, with intense dark brown eyes and exotic-sounding names sit ominously, like vultures, at the edges of the the throngs of sunburned tourists, probing for signs of weakness. And they do not have to probe too hard. I saw numerous young women, some of them attractive, though most heinously fat, ugly, and with a strong suspicion of inbreeding, strolling around in outfits that I would usually classify as underwear. Skimpy underwear at that. Strappy, low cut vests, see through tops, hot pants, skirts so short as to show leopard print thong: all these, and more were on display. People have asked me in the past why so many Arab men regard Western women as whores. The answer is simple. Because by Arab standards, they are. As I watched my second striptease of the day (for the most part, much less aesthetically pleasing than the first I might add), I mused that most of these visitors are whores by Western standards too.

I lingered long after most of the others had left. 12 hours after my first tantalising, breathtaking glimpse of Al Khazneh, I once again walked the quiet, shadowy path through the Siq, glancing back occasionally to catch a last lingering look at the ancient splendour that had so captivated me earlier. It wasn't quite the same. As a number of virile young Bedu would probably be finding out a few hours later, watching women dress is not nearly so exciting as watching them undress. The old lady Petra might be old, and have been around the tracks a bit, but she still hasn't lost her looks, and she puts on one hell of a show.

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The last word goes to John William Burgon, whose famous sonnet, "Petra", immortalised the mythical lost city back in 1845:

It seems no work of Man's creative hand,

by labor wrought as wavering fancy plnned;

But from the rock as by magic grown,

eternal, silent, beautiful, alone!

Not virgin-white like that old Doric shrine,

where erst Athena held her rites divine;

Not saintly-grey, like many a minster fane,

that crowns the hill and consecrates the plain;

But rose-red as if the blush of dawn,

that first beheld them were not yet withdrawn;

The hues of yough upon a brow of woe,

which Man deemed old two thousand years ago,

match me such marvel save in Eastern clime,

a rose-red city half as old as time.

Among The Bedu

The glowing embers of the fire illuminate the faces around the circle, and the charcoal scent of roasting meat wafts from the makeshift grill. Glass cups of sweet black shai glint in the flickering red-orange light as they're passed around, while overhead an astonishing canopy of stars dots the dark, moonless night sky with pinpricks of light drifting across the celestial wasteland of remote time and space. The wind blows gently across the silence of the desert, the only sounds the protesting grunts of the camels penned just behind us and the animated patter of rapid fire Arabic from my amiable Beduin companians.

Suddenly, as if by magic, there is the sound of loud music. The chords seem familiar, yet perhaps my mind is playing tricks on me? It couldn't be, surely? It is. A well-known husky voice growls the opening line, then another gravelly-sounding baritone interjects. Before Sting can add his guttural whine to Bryan Adams and Rod Stewart's wailing, a medley of heavily-accented cries rises from the manically-grinning Bedu as they sing along.

I'm in eastern Syria, sitting in the garden of a Beduin family with whom I'm spending the weekend. I came to visit the fabled Roman ruins of Palmyra; once, in another epoch, a hugely significant outpost on the Silk Road to the Orient, at its zenith ruled by the semi-mythical Queen Zenobia, purportedly a descendent of Cleopatra and Marc Anthony. The Zenobians, and the Romans, may have disappeared into the sands of the desert 18 centuries ago, leaving behind only dusty brown ruins, but not all the inhabitants of this area have been lost in the mists of time. The nomadic Bedu endure here, much as they have for countless millennia, eking a patchy living from the forbidding wastes of sand with camels and small flocks of livestock, wandering the desert with their black goat-hair tents, distinctive red and white checked keffiyehs, and legendary code of honour and hospitality.

Or so the story goes.

Few peoples have been as romanticised by Western travellers as the Bedu. Deified as timeless, immovable, immutable, much like the desert itself, the Bedu long ago ceased to be mere men in the eyes of awestruck orientalists. This race of supermen captivated desert explorers from the earliest days of Western encroachment in the orient. Revered by great men like Burton, Lawrence, and Thesiger for their apparently stubborn resistance to the influence of modernity and their refusal to alter their ancient way of life, these fairytale nomads perservere with their traditions of hospitality and welcome amid the inhospitable landscapes of the harshest, most unforgiving environment on earth.

I was introduced to Ahmed and his bewildering array of brothers, uncles, and cousins through a classmate in Damascus. Bedu hospitality being what it is, I was assured that "of course" there would be no problem in our showing up unannounced for a weekend. The welcome was predictably warm, the smiles sincere, and the tea predictably sweet. Yet far from anachronistic desert-dwellers, rejecting the advances of technology, "civilisation", and modernity, I found my expectations confounded by the often-confusing and contradictory reality of 21st century nomads. Camel-riding desert wanderers who use mobile phones and 4 wheel drives. Devout Muslims who worship Enrique Iglesias and Bryan Adams. Keffiyeh and jalabiyya-wearing fashion victims who argue vehemently over the relative merits of Giorgio Armani and Calvin Klein. Fiercely loyal traditionalists with a strong belief in the purity of their bloodlines who like nothing more than bedding Western tourists awestruck by the otherworldly beauty and exoticism of men who live in the desert.

Despite the late hour (it's well past 2am when we arrive), dinner is prepared and served with gusto. We sit cross-legged on the floor in the living room, a dizzying mosaic of carpets and rugs beneath us, low slung cushions at our backs. An ancient television in the corner shows reruns of what i take to be an Arabic version of Pop Idol. In the modern, globalised world, some things apparently cut across all cultural and linguistic boundaries: talentless masochistic wannabes lobotomised at birth included. The men, and they are all men, eat hungrily. Though it's late, or early, depending on your perspective, it will soon be dawn: the first rays of sunlight will bring the resumption of the Ramadan fast. The plates of humous, salad and chargrilled chicken are cleared away: we sleep where we eat.

Next morning Ahmed's designer jeans and t-shirt have been swapped for austere white robes and checked head-dress. The transformation is startling: suddenly he is no longer an urbane Westernised Syrian, but a desert-dwelling nomad. I fear my own borrowed keffiyeh effects less of a total metamorphasis on my appearance, though it does at least keep me cool as we ride camels to the nearby ruins. Palymra is certainly spectacular: in size, setting, and state of preservation it dwarfs anything in Turkey by a factor of at least ten. Yet given Syria's post 9-11 classification as a "rogue state" and "supporter of terrorism" by the West, the site is deserted. No tour buses or cruise ships here, al hamdu-li-Allah. Yet my hosts might disagree - the family business is tourism - as well as leading trips to the ruins and longer excursions into the desert, Ahmed owns a hotel in the nearby town of Tadmor. Other Bedu families earn a living (or not) in similar fashion: as a result of the slack market numerous camel-drovers and souvenir keffiyeh salesmen loiter languidly in the shade of Palmyra's ancient stones, scarcely a customer in sight.

Despite the tough times, Ahmed blanches at the suggestion of payment for our stay. As friends of a friend, Mauro and I are entitled to the full gamut of Bedu hospitality. Although their way of life is changing rapidly, some things remain the same. The Bedu will adapt their customs, just as they always have (contrary to popular belief, camels were a relatively recent addition to the nomads' arsenal of defences against the ravages of the desert), but Inshaallah their traditions of generosity and kindness to strangers will endure.

As I write this in a Damascus internet cafe, a familiar song plays on the radio. Bryan, Rod, and Sting croon the theme tune to The Three Musketeers. It occurs to me this makes a fitting motif for the Bedu and their ancient code of hospitality: "one for all and all for one." I prefer "Summer of 69" myself, but anyway...