India - Delhi and Agra

I spent a fortnight in India in January - the reason I have waited so long to blog about it is not due to some traumatic experience in an ashram but because my photos are so poor that until now I couldn't bring myself to illustrate a post with them.

I was told that everyone in Delhi would try to con me, and at the airport I was glad to be able to ignore the advice I received from a passing taxi driver that the underground railway was shut due to fog.  In town I found a rickshaw driver who suggested I call my hotel to get directions.  He let me use his phone, and was even kind enough to key in the number himself when I read it out.  The hotel explained that they were terribly sorry but all the roads around had been closed due to the huge religious festival in town that weekend.  The driver suggested he take me to the Official Tourist Office of India so that they could find me a hotel.  He took me to a building which in hindsight may not have been the Official Tourist Office of India, although they did have a poster of the Taj Mahal.  The man there invited me to speak on the phone to a few hotels, which were all full and which I now realise were being voiced by someone in the next door office.  The only thing for it was to go to Agra for the night, and by happy chance this fellow owned a travel company that could sell me a trip there for a very reasonable price!  And so it was that I got to see the Taj Mahal and returned to Delhi in time for my flight to Udaipur a satisfied customer of this intricate and impressive scam.

This might be the worst photo ever taken at the Taj Mahal

The dream tourist site for a Brit.  No idea what the queue was for.

I don't think this photo is bad

Magnificent view of Taj Mahal from Agra Fort

None of this sign makes sense to me, but nonetheless I would like a wazoo tank installed in my flat.

The Turkish Bath

A visit to a Turkish bath on a Sunday evening is just the thing, although probably best avoided if you have a problem with public nudity, either yours or that of the very fat Turkish man sitting opposite you.

The bath house in the Antakya market can't have changed at all for the last 100 years, apart from the electronic massage chair just inside the entrance.  It is open to both men and ladies, only at different times, and I believe the opening hours for ladies are a little restricted.

You are given a loincloth, and first you hang around lying on marble slabs in a very hot room.  Then a man attacks you with a brillo pad and removes about a pound of skin from your body.  His friend then washes you all over with some sort of carbolic soap – this is a little disconcerting as they begin by covering your face with soap so you can’t open your eyes and then suddenly whip off your loin cloth or hurl hot water at your chest or give you a good thump on the stomach with a wet sponge.

The end result is that you are so clean that surely there is no need to wash for at least another week.

The outside of the bath house - you really don't want to see any photos from inside.

A weekend in Antakya

The excellent Hatay Archaeology Museum supposedly has the second largest collection of Roman mosaics in the world.  I don't know where the largest is, but the one in Hatay has quite enough for one day thank you.  The museum had one guard with a pistol and one with a huge truncheon swinging from her belt; if you can think of anything harder to steal than a ten foot square mosaic then I'd like to hear of it but perhaps they have a problem with delinquent youths drawing moustaches on the Roman gods.

Not bad eh?

Some of the mosaics have bits missing, so you have to complete them yourself.  I'm pretty sure this is right.

I'm not sure the museum guards have been doing their job

We watched the Istanbul derby of Besiktas v Galatasaray in a bar, where the atmosphere was predictably raucous.  The game had to be abandoned after hundreds of Besiktas fans stormed the pitch and hurled plastic chairs at tear-gas spraying riot police; nobody in the bar seemed to think it was anything out of the ordinary.  In England they turn the camera away from such incidents, but in Turkey the commentator perks up and describes the incident with a practised eye - "nice back-handed baton use  there" and so on.

Turkey is in fact a curiously violent place, as you will realise if you saw the photo last week of the Turkish MP with a bloody nose after some fairly robust political debating.  Last week on my way to work we got stuck behind a road rage incident where the two drivers were out of their cars and squaring up to each other.  Suddenly a man who I am certain had nothing to do with the incident rushed up with a knife drawn, at which point five other bystanders leapt on him.  All rather jolly.

No weekend here is complete without an ascent of the town hill, which affords some good views and will be blogged about as soon as I run out of more interesting material.

Antakya from the hill.  The alien spaceship that has landed top centre is Prime Mall, second swishest mall in Antakya.

Antakya

I am working for our Syria response team, based in Antakya, Turkey, which is about as close to Syria as you can get without worrying about bombs falling on your head all the time.

Antakya used to be known as Antioch, and it is a fairly important place in the religious history of the Middle East.  A lot of people have heard of Antioch, and imagine it is due to its being mentioned in the Bible, although in fact they tend to be thinking of the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch from the Monty Python film Search for the Holy Grail.

Antakya - old city just behind minaret in the middle

The town is surrounded by the same mountain range as all the towns in northern Iraq, as well as Beirut and Sana'a - presumably this is picked up by big helicopters and put down when I arrive in each new place.  Running through town is the River Orontes, which means Rebel in Turkish as the river flows backwards.  Disappointingly, it turns out that 'backwards' means 'south to north' and not 'uphill'.

Bridge over River Orontes in Antakya town centre - no water visible but I promise it is there

The ancient Church of St Peter is carved into the rock on the edge of town and is surely a fabulous tourist attraction.  We walked there on Christmas Day and found it being renovated - whether it will still count as 'ancient' after the renovation is anyone's guess.

Antakya is seen as a key gateway to Syria by jihadist fighters, and when we fly in from Istanbul it is usually in the company of plenty of men with suspicious beards.  It is also used as an R&R destination for the fighters, though I doubt they visit the church when they come for their week's holiday.  Communications from this part of the world about Syria tend to be monitored, but I doubt a few feeble jokes and badly taken photos every few weeks will cause much alarm.  It might be different if I were in Damascus; a couple of months ago a UN worker there was talking over skype with her boyfriend in Norwegian and a voice came on the line and asked them to stick to either English or Arabic.

End of Yemen

It's a real shame that Yemen gets so few tourists.  The likelihood of being kidnapped before you finish your holiday is such that travel insurance is probably a bit pricey, but the intrepid traveler could enjoy surprisingly lush mountains, empty beaches, amazing ancient cities that look like they might collapse at any moment and a pleasingly weird tribal culture.  Popping out to the shops?  Make sure you take your jambiya, a foot-long curved dagger that is worn in the belt at pretty much all times (although weapons are banned in a lot of offices so you can't always take it to work).  Getting married?  Enjoy the month of paid holiday you get to ensure you have time to do all the partying that is required.

When you get married, you get to wear an awesome hat.

A local sheikh

The end of my deployment in Yemen unfortunately coincided with the opening of a high quality astroturf football pitch just behind my house, where my team dealt a devastating defeat on the Indonesian embassy side.  I will miss a lot of things about Yemen, but having to wait for a vehicle to pick me up to travel 50 yards will not be one of them.

There is a fairly amusing military group called the Houthis who control the north of Yemen.  Their slogan is "God is great, death to America, death to Israel, damn the Jews, Islam will prevail", and they like to plaster this all over the place, on mosques and NGO signs and so on.  They have some beef with Al Qaeda as both think that they are the coolest terrorist group in Yemen.  I came across the below in Kawkaban, a beautiful walled city near Sana'a; the big red and blue bit reads "Al Qaeda - made in America".

Houthi graffiti

I'm stationed near the Turkey / Syria border now, luckily on the Turkish side.  This is a disappointingly sensible country so is likely to provide less fuel for this blog, but we'll see how we go.

Old Sana'a

It’s been a while since I wrote anything here; this is mostly because nothing has happened in the last month due to a combination of Ramadan, the Eid holiday and terrorist threats.  The first two are by far the most damaging to the Yemen economy, as output in every office dries to a trickle.  Terrorist threats are tiresome in that they mostly lead to a lot of time spent locked in your house.  My housemate and I broke records for tea consumption, and became adept at telling the difference between drones and observation planes by sound alone.

I returned from a trip to the UK with a suitcase full of pork products, which were recently put to good use by feeding a houseful of people.  I learnt that under Yemeni law possession of pork is still technically punishable by death, so I’m glad we ate the evidence.  A friend of mine used to hide bottles of booze in her suitcase by wrapping them in bacon, which is like confessing to a murder to act as an alibi for a robbery.

Other than brunch the main event going on in Yemen is the National Dialogue, which started on 18th March and is supposed to run for six months but will presumably go on for far longer.  The UN and other well-wishers are funding 565 Yemenis with some vague association with politics to the tune of $100-200 each per day to do a bit of head-scratching and write such minutiae as a constitution, a legal framework and a system of government.  The process began with the splitting of the 565 into nine divisions, and these divisions were split into groups and then sub-groups.  This took the first week.  I am not optimistic for the outcome.

Since I don't have much to say, here are some photos of Sana'a's Old City, which has a claim to being the oldest continually inhabited city on earth.  It is also the only part of Sana'a where westerners are supposed to be safe from kidnapping, as making a fast getaway through its labyrinthine streets would be too hard to be worth bothering with.

Proximity to Tahla Mosque - good for photo, bad for avoiding being woken up by dawn call to prayer

Good luck to any kidnappers driving at 100mph down here

In the distance is the Movenpick Hotel, totally secure and totally devoid of romance

Always good to have neighbours with Sky Sports

Aden

Apologies for the long silence; here is my excuse and also a vignette of Yemeni life.  I can only get internet in my apartment when city power is working in Sana'a, and lately city power has mostly been a memory.  This is due to the enterprising tactics of the tribes in Marib, east of Sana'a, who are spending all of their spare time blowing up pylons and power lines.  They hope that sufficient disruption of the lives of people in the capital will lead to their demands being met, which are many and varied.  Lately they have even been shooting the repair men, which is why being an electrical engineer here is a profession only for a daredevil.

I had a pleasant two days in Aden, capital of the South.  The British spent a few years in the 60s finding it a useful place to fill their boats up with 4 star unleaded on the way to India, but eventually got sick of the restless natives and left them to it.  There is still a statue of Queen Victoria in Victoria Park, and a chip van that hasn't moved in the last 50 years.  There are some nice beaches in Aden, where you can be titillated by the sight of a lady's ankle as her abaya flaps up when she dives into the sea.

Aden Bay, or is that Aden Bay in the background?

Sultan's Palace, minus Sultan

The geography of Aden is complicated - it is built around the crater of an extinct (hopefully) volcano and on a series of peninsulas that jut into the Indian ocean.  The heat and humidity is quite something, and I'm glad that Sana'a is a mile and a half above sea level and therefore comparatively cool.  Our Aden staff work amazingly long hours, mainly because they want to enjoy the air conditioning in the office for as long as they can before they go to their sweltering homes.

Who do I have to kill to get a game there?

A lot of the Southerners are up for a return for an independent South, and they hold a thing called "civil disobedience" every Wednesday, which is quite touching.  This is basically a load of students who put up roadblocks in really inconvenient places, and they probably refuse to tidy their rooms as well.

Showing some respect in Victoria Park

Speaking of colonialism, I went to a reception at the residence of the British Ambassador the other day. Sana'a is predicted to be the world's first capital city to run out of water, but I am glad to report that the fountain was in full spout and the swimming pool full to the brim.  No one lives at the residence as its 20 foot walls are not deemed high enough to keep out the wannabe suicide bombers, so the grand piano doesn't get much use.  The gentlemen's convenience reminded me of the Executive Washroom in the Simpsons, essentially an enormous room with a lavatory right in the middle of it, although the string quartet must have been on their break.