Top 4 Ancient World Sites

1. Palmyra, Syria

Windswept, wild and vast, the roman city of Palmyra sits by an oasis under the shadow of an Arab castle. You could spend days walking among the grand arches, leaning pillars and ruined temples that line this forgotten corner of the desert without really feeling you understood the place, nor the strange tower tombs that stand in the ‘Valley of the Dead’ nearby.

2. Hagia Sofia, Istanbul, Turkey

Few buildings truly seem unqiue: however impressive a great cathedral might be, there’s always an echo of another building; the sense it follows some sort of vague pattern repeated over the world. The Hagia Sofia is at once majestic, and unlike any building in the world. Still standing nearly 1500 years after its construction, the greatest relic of Byzantium has served a church, a mosque and is now a museum.

3. Volubilis, Meknes, Morocco

Volubilis is ancient world tourism at its very best: keep-off signs, leaflets and guides are nowhere to be seen, and the few wardens that guard the site chat in the shade beneath the olive trees. One of the most distant outposts of the Roman Empire, lizards now bask on the mosaics, and birds make their nests in pillars of the capitol.

4. Herculaneum, Bay of Naples, Italy

Strolling through the streets of Ercolano, with its tidily presented cafes and humble apartment blocks, few first-time visitors could expect to stumble a gaping hole in the ground, let alone the Roman town that fits snugly inside it. Wandering around, it’s amazing to think that citizens must have ran through Herculaneum’s narrow streets, past its grand townhouses, chased by the pyroclastic flow from Vesuvius and not knowing they were doomed to die at the seashore.

Top 5… wilderness movies

5) Wolf Creek (2005)
Often dismissed as a grisly peer of Hostel and the Saw canon, Wolf Creek’s nomadic psychopath somehow manages to make the vastness of the Australian outback feel claustrophobic. Though much of the dialogue is trite, the director’s feel for an alien landscape of meteor craters, derelict mines and straight roads is commendable.

4) No Country for Old Men (2007)
After firing blanks for several years, the Coen brothers returned to form in 2007 with No Country for Old Men, and like so much that is great in American culture, the frontier is in this film’s DNA. The scene in which a rottweiler chases Josh Brolin through the Texan tundra into the early dawn is masterly cinema.

3) The English Patient (1997)
Anthony Mingella’s masterpiece combines the sweep of Merchant Ivory productions with the moral precariousness of Ondaatje’s novel. The closing scenes in the desert scapes of North Africa – in which Fiennes’ character attempts to rescue Scott Thomas’ -count among the most moving in modern times.

2) Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
No film can ever maintain dramatic momentum over 227 minutes quite like Lawrence of Arabia. Peter O’Toole’s luminous performance and Maurice Jarre’s legendary, arching anthem are matched by loving cinematography, from the billowing sands of the Hejaz to the red rocks of Transjordan. Lawrence of Arabia is truly the king of all epics.

1) Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
The romance of the wilderness is at the very core of Butch and Sundance. As the movie’s centrepiece, Paul Newman and Robert Redford beat a retreat through the spectacular, silent landscapes of Colorado with their pursuers a distant presence on the horizon.

Big Locations through the Backdoor

Here’s an article I recently wrote for my application to the BBC Graduate Scheme… hope you enjoy it!

 

Big locations… through the backdoor

Getting to Russia, Syria, Tunisia and Ukraine for less than £100? Travel for a fraction of the cost by doing a “budget flight and border hop”…

The souks of Aleppo, Syria, bewilder and beguile visitors. The few tourists who venture into the market are immediately immersed in the smells of the souk, lost among the narrow alleyways and looming arches that cross their path. Butchers, jewellers and tailors pass by, and Aleppo goes about its business in much the same way as it has done since the Middle Ages, when Saladin fought the Christian Crusaders who mercilessly besieged the town. Somewhere, deep in the market, the Ottoman hammams (thermal baths) bubble away, and the muezzin prepares for his afternoon call to prayer from the minaret of the Great Mosque.

 

And the price of reaching one of the most beautiful cities in the Middle East? A total travelling cost of £70, one way, from London. Admittedly, you may have to adjust to sleeping on an overnight train. You may even have to learn a few choice Turkish phrases, but by joining in the latest travelling phenomenon – “border hopping” – you’ll save hundreds, and you’ll be in good company.

 

Every year, thousands of savvy travellers dodge big air fares to expensive airports by catching a budget flight to a neighbouring country, before hopping over the border to their destination. 

 

St. Petersburg, for example, is regrettably not a budget airline destination – with return flights seldom sizing up at less than £300. The fairytale capital of Tallinn, Estonia, on the other hand can be reached for as little as £25 one way, with an eight hour bus journey along the Baltic to St. Petersburg costing an additional £16. 

 

Added up, “border hopping” your way to Russia could come to as little as £80 return – a saving of over £200. With a bit of organisation, it might even cost you as little as half a day’s travelling time, before you find yourself wandering the long avenues of the Tsars’ former capital. 

 

Jessica Grannatt, 22, recently made the trip from Tallinn to St. Petersburg by bus and would recommend it to anyone: “When you travel on the road you get a sense of arriving at a city, which is a feeling you just don’t get on a plane.”

 

Border hopping needn’t be confined to bus journeys. To reach Aleppo, catch a budget flight to Istanbul before following in the footsteps of Agatha Christie and Lawrence of Arabia by boarding the recently reopened Toros Express from Istanbul’s grand Haydarpasa Station. 

 

The train departs Istanbul at 8 ‘o clock in the morning, and you’ll soon find yourself sweeping through some of the most beautiful landscapes in Anatolia. After settling down in the sleeper carriage, passengers awake the next day in the Arab world, arriving in Aleppo early in the afternoon having dodged an expensive direct flight to Syria.

Border hopping might not be for everyone, and undeniably many travellers would pay extra to avoid the hassle. But as budget airlines continue to extend their reach, swathes of expensive locations might only be a hop over the horizon.

Make it happen

Here are four of the best border hops:

 

ISTANBUL (Turkey) to ALEPPO (Syria)

The Backdoor – Istanbul

Istanbul needs no introduction. The bottleneck through which invading armies from Europe and Asia have passed, it positively oozes history. There can be no better way to whet your appetite for a hop onto the Middle East than a walk through the city’s raucous bazaars. 

Pegasus Airways from London Stansted to Istanbul S. Gocken start at £39 (one way, inc tax).

The Border Hop 

Departing on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays at 8am, the Toros Express is a romantic – and notoriously unreliable – way of getting to Syria. Fortunately, overnight buses also operate from Istanbul to Aleppo via Antakya, departing daily from the Buyuk Otogar. You may have to take a thick novel, but at least you’ll be saving yourself the £400 cost of a typical return flight to Syria.

The price of bus and train tickets fluctuates regularly. Istanbul to Aleppo with bus company Hatay SAS starts at £22.

ALEPPO

Despite boasting the largest souk and possibly the finest citadel in the Middle East, Aleppo attracts comparatively few visitors. Fortunately, this means you’ll avoid the sort of hassle tourists experience in places like Cairo and Marrakech, and visitors get to explore this magical city at their own pace.

Sleep: A grand old establishment that has fallen on hard times, The Baron still displays the unpaid bill of its most famous guest – T.E. Lawrence – in the lobby. Although the rooms are rough around the edges, few can match the charm of the Baron’s faded glamour (from £15, 00963 21 210 880).

See: Crusader Knights were held in the Dungeons of the Citadel for ten to twenty years at a time without seeing daylight. Remember to bring a torch, as the dungeons remain unlit to this day.

Do: No visit to Aleppo would be complete without a trip to one of the hammams – the Turkish baths that have served as the social focus of the city for hundreds of years. Your first visit will be baffling – customers are led through a series of ante-rooms, scrubbed, massaged, steamed and dried down before relaxing with a cup of tea (from £5).

 

RZESZOW (Poland) to LVIV (Ukraine)

The Backdoor – Rzeszow

A sleepy little town in southern Poland, Rzeszow, with its café-lined town square, makes for an agreeable place to spend a day or two. Beneath Rzeszow, visitors can explore an ‘underground city’ of tunnels and cellars, some of which date back to the Middle Ages. 

Ryanair flights from London Stansted to Rzeszow start at £25 (one way, inc tax).

The Border Hop

Rzeszow is only about 100 miles from Lviv, and there are various options for would be ‘hoppers’. Buses run from downtown Rzeszow to the Ukrainian border, where minibuses to Lviv are readily available. However the Krakow-Lviv railway line has been improved, and is to reopen by May 2009  making it easy to take a train from Rzeszow, changing at Premysl. It might require a bit of organisation, but it’ll mean you’ll avoid the £200 cost of a return flight to Lviv.

Combined bus fares to Lviv cost no more than £15.

LVIV

Regarded by many as the cultural capital of the Ukraine, Lviv can claim to be one of the last remaining hidden gems of Eastern Europe. With an old town that has become a Unesco World Heritage site, Lviv’s cobbled streets and thickly wooded parks exude old-world grandeur. But don’t be fooled: this ever-changing city boasts a vibrant nightlife and is awash with young artists, musicians and performers.

Sleep: The Kosmonaut hostel near the market square proudly proclaims itself to be the ‘new frontier of free Europe’, and visitors are surrounded by Communist memorabilia and kitsch from the city’s past (from £8 www.thekosmonaut.com).

See: Climbing the tower of the Lviv’s Town Hall is not for the faint hearted. From the top, the city’s diverse heritage is on show for all: the spires of Armenian, Greek Catholic and Ukrainian Orthodox churches loom over the squares and the townhouses of the old city.

Do: Keep the revolutionary spirit alive with a visit to the Kriyvka bar – meaning “bunker” in Ukrainian. This anti-Nazi and anti-Communist themed drinking hole has become increasingly popular since Ukraine’s “Orange Revolution” in 2004, when the nation peacefully rose up against the ‘rigged election’ of Viktor Yanukovych.

 

PALERMO (Italy) to TUNIS (Tunisia)

The Backdoor – Palermo

From the clamour of the Vucciria market to the opulence of its cathedral, Palermo’s Sicilian swagger is on show all over the city. A seaport that’s fiercely proud of its peculiar heritage – having changed hands between Roman, Byzantine and Arab armies – what better place from which to stage an expedition to North Africa?

Ryanair flights from London Stansted to Palermo start at £20 (one way inc tax).

The Border Hop

Taking the boat from Palermo to Tunis will see you retracing the route of the ancient Carthaginians who once ruled this corner of the Mediterranean. The journey takes approximately 9 hours, but will save you the £200 cost of many return flights to Tunisia.

Grimaldi Lines sail twice a week from Palermo to Tunis, with prices starting at £40 (one way inc tax). Grandi Navi Velochi sail once a week from Palermo to Tunis, with prices starting at £40 (one way inc tax).

TUNIS

Too often associated with package holidays and soulless resorts, Tunis can claim one of the finest old cities in the Maghreb. Expect to be lost in the labyrinth of alleyways that weave their way between the white washed buildings of the medina. The French quarter, with its wide boulevards and cafes, is ideal for unwinding after a hard day’s bartering with market traders.

Sleep: Built in the French colonial style, La Maison Doree is a centrally located hotel built around a courtyard. In a city with no shortage of substandard accommodation, it’s quite possibly the best of the budget hotels (from £14, 00216 71 240 632).

See: Now a suburb of Tunis, little now remains of ancient Carthage, the city that dared defy the Roman Empire and paid the price: it was set ablaze and its citizens were enslaved. Fortunately, the ruins occupy an attractive site overlooking the Mediterranean which now hosts the International Carthage Festival from June to August: a mixture of traditional and contemporary performance from the Arab world and beyond.

Do: Those who brave the markets of the medina should prepare to become very popular: the tourist touts of Tunis are some of the most persistent in the world. Bartering is a skill that requires practice, but with a little patience can be fantastic fun. Look out for the Souk El Birka – the jewellery market – and the Souk el Leffa – the carpet market.

 

TALLINN (Estonia) to ST. PETERSBURG (Russia)

The Backdoor – Tallinn

The most attractive of the Baltic capitals, Tallinn, Estonia – with its skyline of red roofs – has become a popular budget flight destination in recent years. Divided between the Toompea (Cathedral Hill) and the merchant’s Hanseatic town, visitors could comfortably pass a few days meandering the streets of the city before moving on to St. P’s.

EasyJet flights from London Stansted to Tallinn start at £25 (one way inc tax).

The Border Hop

Fortunately, Tallinn to St. Petersburg is a quite well trodden hop. Buses depart several times a day to the St. Petersburg terminal.

Tallinn to St. Petersburg with Eurolines starts at £16 (one way inc tax).

ST. PETERSBURG

The ‘Venice of the North’, the ‘Gateway to the East’ – no sobriquet quite does justice to St. Petersburg, a city whose imperial splendour has survived bitter wars and a bloody revolution. There is enough here for a lifetime’s exploration: over 200 museums, dozens of grand monuments, beautiful parkland and, of course, the peerless Hermitage.  

Sleep: St. Petersburg was recently revealed to be one of the world’s most expensive cities to live in, so good budget accommodation can be hard to come by. Cubahostel is a small, friendly hostel located close to the city’s main street, the Nevsky Prospekt (from £10, www.cubahostel.ru).

See: Founded by Peter the Great in 1719, the Kunstkamera museum is a haphazard and bizarre collection that features, among other things, deformed human and animal foetuses. It was originally devised by Peter to debunk contemporary suspicions that deformities were caused by witchcraft. 

Do: Ballet and opera performances have long featured on the itineraries of visitors to St. Petersburg, but tickets to the world famous Mariinsky Theatre can often be expensive and hard to come by. Instead, head to a recital at the Conservatory – whose graduates include Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev and Shostakovich – to hear the country’s finest musical talents before they become famous.

Putting Barry on the Map

My googlemap Gavin and Stacey tour of South Wales

The map below features about 25 filming locations for Gavin and Stacey in the South Wales area. Click on Cardiff Station to begin…

View Larger Map

Doctor Who? With the announcement of a third series, Gavin and Stacey tourism is the only thing ‘occurring’ in the Cardiff area.

On a quiet, leafy suburban housing estate near Penarth, traffic is steadily increasing. Visitors furtively step out of their cars, walk a short distance past an ordinary house – casting a calculated glance down its driveway – before hopping back into their vehicles as if nothing had ever happened.

But this isn’t the site of a murder, nor is it a celebrity’s house.

This is the house of Gavin – of Gavin and Stacey fame – 198 miles away from its on-screen location in Billericay, Essex. The series, despite its humble beginnings in 2007, has become the biggest success story of BBC comedy since The Office, with nearly two million viewers in its second series, and seven million watching the Christmas special.

Although the storyline see-saws between Essex and Barry Island, every episode (with the exception of a day trip to London) is filmed in a relatively small part of South Wales. Barry pubs pass as Billericay bars, the back end of Cardiff station masquerades as Billericay station, Cardiff nightclubs and kebab shops play host to a messy stag-do in Essex. Slowly but surely, inquisitive groups of families and friends are making pilgrimages to these locations, and it’s an arrangement that suits the Barry tourist board.

“We’re getting a lot of reports back from guesthouses and B&Bs saying people are visiting sites where Gavin and Stacey is filmed” says Claire Evans, Tourism and Marketing Manager for the town: “Some traders on Barry Island were saying they were getting a 20% mark up.”

Other businesses are also starting to benefit from the popularity of the show. “We seem to get a lot of tourists in” confessed a barmaid at the Colcot Arms, Gavin and Smithy’s favourite Billericay watering hole. “This one week we had a load of people from Essex come on a day trip down here.”

However, some suspect the impact of Gavin and Stacey tourism has been overstated. Lauren, an attendant at Island Leisure – the amusement arcade which houses Nessa’s booth – says appearing on the show hasn’t significantly boosted their business. “To be honest, it seems mostly to be people coming in to snoop around, rather than spending money. But (the BBC) do pay us when they use the building.”

The owners of Gavin’s house, in particular, have not responded well to their property’s new found fame, with Julia Dwyer telling the Daily Mirror: “People come and ask for a look round our own home. We’re fed up with it. It’s an invasion of our privacy.” With the announcement just before Christmas of a third series, the family look set to experience more unwanted attention. However, the proposed Gavin and Stacey trail – suggested by Councillor Rob Curtis, and brought before a council committee this week – would not include Gavin’s house, with the Vale of Glamorgan council insisting private residences not be included.

Slideshow of Filming Locations

To find these locations, see the googlemap at the top of the page!

Few have responded to the success of the programme with greater enthusiasm than Glenda Kenyon, 54, the owner of Stacey’s House on Trinity Street, Barry. Whenever visitors tentatively pace up and down outside the house, Glenda opens the door and invites them in for a closer look. Glenda reveals how her house was picked for the hit TV show:

“Everybody on Trinity St. received a letter. Because I can’t read or write, there was a telephone number. I phoned them up and they said they wanted to do a comedy drama. I said yeah!”

Audio Backstory*

Inside, the house appears in almost exactly the same way as in the show. With the exception of a framed portrait of the cast above the fireplace and a few pictures of Glenda’s grandchildren, the furniture – and the famous couch – is unchanged. She says the cast and crew are excellent house guests, and always leave her home in impeccable order:

“Ruth Jones is asthmatic – she doesn’t like dogs or cats so they have to bring cleaners in. I don’t mind the house all nice when I come back!”

Despite the Vale of Glamorgan council’s concern over her admitting strangers into her home, Glenda doubts she will ever tire of showing people around.

“I’m doing it because that’s the way I am.”

 

 

*spokesperson’s quote read by Jessica Elgot.

Twitter and Mumbai

In the last lecture of this term’s Online course, BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan Jones – a serial blogger here – expounded his faith in Twitter and his conviction that the Mumbai attacks of 26th November had been Twitter’s big moment. Gaurav Mishra – a world renowned twitexpert – has been instrumental in bringing the micro blogging site to the world’s attention, citing it as “the best source for real time citizen news on the Mumbai terrorist attacks” as the events were unfolding.

With jammed mobile phone networks and a hostile environment where journalists had good reason to fear being targetted, Twitter emerged as an indispensible source of information, with even the BBC “blindly” – in Mishra’s words – quoting tweets on their news feed. CNN even suggested its viewers subscribe to Twitter streams that offered information about how to stay safe and how to contact loved ones in danger.

As things died down, newspapers and websites continued to gush on Twitter’s big moment and its ability to provide an avalanche of real-time information as the world looked on in fear. But if twitter is a ‘real time’ tool, surely analysing it in retrospect has its own limitations? Misinformed tweets – that some critics suggest may have exacerbated the hysteria and confusion – can be easily amended or deleted.

By relying too much on Twitter, the BBC and CNN may have compromised the public’s trust by failing to demarkate the boundaries of rumour and truth. One twitoskeptic – Thomas Sutcliffe writing in the Independent – has identified the core problem of passing tweeters off as journalists:

Twitterers are hair-trigger communicators, and presumably absolutely itching to get something of substance into their despatches. Whereas a journalist has a reasonably strong incentive not to broadcast misleading or dubious information, because such an eventuality would come with a professional cost, a Twitterer owes no duty except to their own impressions and their own state of mind.

The question of a Tweeter’s motivation – and the motivation of any user publishing information – goes to the very heart of the UGC debate. 

I’d like to respond to Dan Thornton’s comment posted below:

A Twitterer does have a strong incentive not to broadcast misleading information, because they’ve built up a network relying on trust rather than the brand on their masthead, and therefore dubious information damages them far more than a journalist who can hide behind their title!

There should be an indication of sources, but at the same time, I’ve found Twitter a far more reliable and faster way to obtain news by building a network of people that are trustworthy, beating the news networks on many occasions, and far quicker to respond when errors are brought to light.

I’m afraid I can’t agree that a ‘Twitterer’ puts more at stake than a journalist publishing misleading information. There is no mechanism to stop troublemakers creating multiple accounts, nor to verify that they are indeed who they claim to be. Like all other elements of UGC, Twitter is susceptible to polemics and biased accounts.

Slipping under the radar…

 

That in Aleppo once...

 

This summer I tried something I’d never tried before: I lived without the internet for nearly a week when traveling across Turkey. For a couple of days, my mother’s bi-hourly missive – ‘Are you still alive?’ – went unread. The goings-on in the summer transfer window went unchecked, facebook friends went unpoked. Even the Nigerian gentleman who reminds me every week that he is the son of a deceased billionaire must have wondered what happened to me. 

Most telling of all, I remember sitting drinking a coffee in Antakya while a man gestured at TV showing the Iraq war, angrily shouting ‘George’ (which I presumed meant George Bush) as I sipped my cappucino. Only some time later did I realise he was saying ‘Georgia’, and that in my little backpack bubble I had missed an entire war in the Caucasus (although I confess I did wonder how so many lime green shell-suits had found their way to Basra).

But then I landed in an internet cafe in Aleppo, Syria, found a computer, and prepared to come out of my social-coma. I typed in www.facebook.com. Nothing. I tried again. Nothing. I tried youtube… Only after calling over the assistant did I realise that I was trying to access websites that were illegal in Syria (I heard on the grapevine that facebook was banned because posts on the now-defunct Syria network page were a source of constant embarrassment to the government, but there are are other theories).

Over here, a dodgy html usually brings a helpful member of IT staff to your desk. In Syria, expect a beefy policeman. Think less thumbnails, more thumbscrews.

Major news sites were also heavily edited, and dissident sites – like Free Syria – were, of course, banned. But astonishingly this blog – which provides both news and critical analysis of Middle East goings on – was accessible. While few Syrians would even dream of voicing their opposition to the plans for demolishing parts of old Damascus in public, this once popular blog dares do exactly that. 

Clearly, major newshubs can be identified, controlled and blocked. By contrast, the blogosphere serves as the modern day equivalent of the dissident pamphleteer. Blogs are versatile – serving to inform and to comment – created with a minimum of technical expertise, broadly dispersed and easily reassembled if ever dismantled. 

Their sites can be easy to find, their authors difficult to trace. Clearly, Bashar Al-Assad (whose only previous management role before becoming President was as head of the Syrian Computer Society!) – has resigned himself to being undermined by a blogosphere with endless potential for proliferation. Even his own diplomats are in on the act.

Antony Loewenstein – author of ‘The Blogging Revolution’ – shares some interesting thoughts on blogging in the Middle East in a response to last week’s report on the repression of online journalists:

A lost opportunity in Syria…

It’s a cliche – and more often than not a lie – to say that any country is worth visiting for the hospitality of its people alone. But I have never met a people more generous than the Syrians I met traveling this summer.

Most guidebooks warn against discussing politics in a country that has been under Ba’athist rule for over 45 years, but on numerous occasions I found local people eager to speak about how they responded to American and European presence in the region.

Although some were vehemently anti-American, I was never greeted with any hostility when I told them I was British. Equally, most – I remember particularly the young men in the Damascus hamman – were capable of making the distinction between a government and its people, and looked forward to a new administration in Washington.

So it’s with great disappointment that I heard about the American incursion into Syria last week. After a summer in which the Syrians have promised to open an embassy in Lebanon and ‘come in from the cold’ into the open arms of President Sarkozy (presumably also thawed by Carla Bruni), the American strike at Abu Kamal flies in the face of a European strategy to bury the hatchet with President Bashar. What a waste!

Trouble at the edge of the world…

When I was in the Great Lakes region around two years ago, the DRCongo was going through a quiet spell. But even then, I still sensed that for many Rwandans and Ugandans, the Congo border might as well have been the edge of the world, though it is hundreds of miles inland from the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

Both Rwanda and Uganda enjoy (by African standards) good road and communication networks that flow freely into Kenya and Tanzania, but come to an abrupt halt in Congo’s isolated North Kivu province.

Unlike Kenya and Tanzania, the DRCongo has been an unknowable quantity from which streams of refugees have poured with scant warning; from which terrorising armies – like the Interhamwe and Joseph Kony’s LRA – have entered the two countries, and into which they can disappear without a trace.

The old warning at the corners of medieval maps – ‘Hir there be dragons’ – could hardly be more apt: a UN staff member once told me over a pizza in the Rwandan capital Kigali that noone dared travel the road from Goma to Kisangani for fear of being attacked by cannibals.

The Congo casts a long shadow over its neighbours: where Rwanda has come some way to reconciling Tutsi with Hutu, the core antagonisms that led the 1994/5 genocide survive in Eastern Congo. And now it seems the region is breeding another humanitarian disaster, General Nkunda being the latest warlord to fill the power vacuum in the region.

However much Western governments and NGOs may congratulate themselves on their successes in post-1995 Rwanda, an anarchic North Kivu will continue to undermine stablity and propserity in the Great Lakes region. This is clearly not only a crisis for Kinshasa, but also for the whole of East Africa.

Sunset over Eastern Congo, 2006