Destinations
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Sinai – the other Egypt
I’m just back from another Sinai trip. A few days in Cairo then 10 1/2-hours by bus to Dahab. In Cairo I stayed at the same $10 Downtown hotel I’ve briefly called home on numerous occasions since my first visit to the city in the late 1980s. I’ve seen the place buzzing, filled by young Israelis…
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My Big Fat Greek Tragedy II
This short magazine piece focusing on tourism in Crete was commissioned in 2012 and then sat on until stale, falling between the cracks of editorial redundancy and changing Travel Editors. Now seems an apposite time to blog the text, as Greece’s January 2015 election promises to pitch Europe, and more specifically the EU, into a…
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Sierra Leone
I’ve visited Sierra Leone twice, once in 2007, five years after the brutal civil war (my paywalled piece for The Times here – and later in 2010 (my piece for The Independent on Sunday here – when a nascent tourism industry was just beginning to gain momentum. By 2010, tangible progress was apparent. In Freetown…
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Cuba – Beyond independence…
At the showcase agricultural community of Las Terrazas in Cuba’s Sierra del Rosario, I sip a café con leche at the state-owned Café de Maria and try to tune my Short Wave radio to the BBC. For Cubans, conduits to world news remain constricted. Internet at six Convertible Pesos (CUC) an hour is out of…
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Benghazi – the day after…
Right now it seems there’s so much bad news from Libya that the networks are tired of carrying it. Even my most optimistic contacts in Benghazi report that security has deteriorated. However, against the chaos of kidnappings and assassinations it’s easy to forget that Libya under Gaddafi wasn’t exactly a bed of roses either. The…
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From Our Own Correspondent – Bangladesh – Chittagong Hill Tracts
For those who weren’t tuned to the BBC World Service, 2nd April at 19:50 GMT, here’s a link to my latest From Our Own Correspondent piece – http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01w7k0t I butt in around 4′ 30″. If you’d rather read the copy, as delivered from a rather too-snug wardrobe at BBC Newcastle, I’ve pasted it in below…
The Irresponsible Traveller 