Maikli

Took advantage of some very cheap flights and spent two weeks in Tunisia in April. Stayes away from the resorts and headed to the more unexplored regions. Bizerte is an amazing old port with great empty beaches, Beja and le Kef interesting old towns on hilltops, Sfax a fascinating medina with very few tourists…but maybe the biggest surprise was Tunis. Coach tours bring holidaymakers from the beach “ghettos” and drag them through a souvenir market or two, before whisking them off to a museum and Sidi Bou Said, but the rest of the city is left untouched…it is a great city to walk around with a huge medina and a few old suburbs, and the coastal suburbs are very easy to reach too. i’d heard many bad things about Tunisia from those on package tours, but I saw a completely different side to the country…would love to go back and explore some more.

I was planning only to transit Trieste on the way to Slovenia, but arrived late in the evening and cursed having to stay overnight…in the morning, the city centre was quite a nice discovery! If it wasn’t so close to Venice, I think Trieste would be a big attraction for tourists, but Venice does tend to take the limelight away from this underrated city.

Went there on a school expedition…we spent five weeks trekking through the Auyuittuq National Park which was stunning in places. Very isolated…we saw nobody else for the first two weeks. the highlight for me was to visit the communities of Pangnirtung and Qeqeqtarjuaq (Broughton Island). Iqaluit was strange though…

I’ve heard good things about Somaliland, the breakaway region in the north which is apparently a lot safer than the rest of the country.

istanbul is one of those places you are expected to fall in love with. Normally, I end up hating that sort of place, but with Istanbul, I made an exception…it is great! So many different sides to this city…in 6 months, i only just scratched the surface.

I studied Arabic in Sana’a for three months back in 2000, and would recommend it to anyone wanting to learn Arabic. Sana’a is probably one of the most stunning cities I have seen. Didn’t gte to see as much of the country as I would have liked, as I had limited time to travel…only saw Ta’izz, Aden, Zabid and the Red Sea coast, and on my return trip just after september 11th 2001, foreigners weren’t allowed outside Sana’a. Want to go back to trek in the mountains, and also to see the east, Wadi hadramawt.

Mahdia was my first intro to Arab culture, and it was a good one…a pretty old town and a great beach. It was just for a week, and i wantt o go back to explore Tunis, Bizerte, the north, and the desert region in the south.

After visiting other places in the Middle East, everyone said “oh, you must go to Egypt”. So I went…Cairo is so huge and so noisy, over two weeks I tried and tried to like it but couldn’t. The pyramids are impressive, yes, but the experience is dampened by the ever-presence of someone trying to sell you something, put you on a camel, give you a tour, “bakhsheesh bakhsheesh”...it just drove me insane. Luxor was ruined by thousands and thousands of tourists, and even more touts. Aswan was a smaller version of that. The places I did like were Alexandria, a modern working city where there is no hassle for tourists, and the oasis of Al-Kharga, a bit off the beaten track. But I think most people who go will want to see the Pyramids, luxor and other big draws, and the constant hassle might put them off exploring further.

My highlight was getting on the ferry down the Nile into Sudan…the pressure to buy a papyrus scroll, a pharaonic headdress or a stuffed camel magically disappeared!

Not really a holiday destination to suit everyone, but for an off-beat trip, Azerbaijan fits the bill. Baku is surprisingly nice, not just endless tower blocks and polluted wastegrounds as I was led to believe before going. The rest of the country is a mixture of hilltowns, remote villages, desert and oil rigs. Quirky is the word…

One of my favourite countries, Georgia is a bit wild but will maybe become a big tourist destination in the future. The caucasus mountains are amazing, although I didn’t manage to go anywhere too remote like Khevsureti or Tusheti, which was a shame. Tbilisi, I could spend weeks there…and did! The food is great, and the wine excellent…although Georgian hospitality does get a bit heavy at times, when you’re forced to drink ridiculous amounts of wine. Hardly any tourists go there at the moment…some think it is too dangerous, most confuse it with the US state. Now is the time to go…