revolution
-
Return to Tunisia… again
Last month I flew to Tunis and spent a week exploring Roman, pre-Roman and pre-historic sites across Tunisia. I’ve been ‘back to Tunisia’ before, after the Jasmine Revolution, the first and most effective popular revolt of the Arab Spring. This time it was the murder in 2015 of 30 British tourists and eight others on…
-
Sinai – Dahab’s other story…
I’ve separated this post from the last one. The story is the kind thing that doesn’t make it into travel copy – ‘Social commentary, we don’t have the word count…etc…’ As I described, for visitors Dahab is a funky beach stay – excellent dives sites (the Blue Hole and others) and, even for those packing…
-
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…
-
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…
-
The People Want the Fall of the Regime…
It’s said that those who forget their history are condemned to repeat it, and collective memory can be surprisingly short. Last week former Field Marshal Abdul Fattah al-Sisi slipped into something more comfortable than his usual freshly pressed military dress uniform, determined to look his best civilian self for next month’s Presidential elections. It’s perhaps…
-
Egypt – it’s all about the long game…
A couple of weeks ago I found myself in discussion with a UK-based lawyer, a frequent business traveller to Cairo, who sought to make sense of Egypt’s incomplete 2011 revolution, and its recent rather more emphatic military coup. ‘There were people in Egypt, ordinary professional people, women, minorities – Copts and others. They went to…
The Irresponsible Traveller 