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 [...]

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) [...]

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. [...]

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

Twitter and Mumbai

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.

Slipping under the radar…

 
 
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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]