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.

Qat

Yum

In the name of research I've been chewing a bit of qat every now and then.  Qat is a hard drug - not because it's class A but in the sense that it's pretty hard to do it right.  You need to store an allotment's worth of chewed up leaves and stalks in your cheek, something a hamster would do with aplomb but that I find rather difficult.  It can also be hard to tell the effect - the plant contains a mild amphetamine and it does deliver a bit of a light-headed buzz but probably no more than can be achieved by sitting with your head between your legs and then standing up quickly.

Apart from delivering spectacular insomnia, qat's main property is that it loosens the tongue.  Arabs are never short of an opinion on politics, but leave three or four Yemenis in a room with a pile of qat and they'll solve the Israel problem, explain how George W Bush got elected, eradicate global inequality and find a use for Nick Clegg.

A friend took me to a chew with a bunch of politicians, sheikhs and so on at the house of a prominent businessman.  In the mafraj (a room that exists solely for chewing) I counted thirteen bags of qat, two shisha pipes, eleven packs of cigarettes, nine white robes, one white fez-like hat, eight moustaches, five ipads and ten smartphones.  The Prime Minister is usually in attendance at this particular chew, but he is out of the country - I was happy to be told that he wouldn't take kindly to me as I was sitting in his usual seat in the corner.  The conversation was varied and much of it passed over my head, but I can inform you that many of Yemen's most prestigious men LOVE facebook.  My role was mostly limited to looking interested and listening, especially when the conversation was in arabic as my speaking is improving but I didn't think any of them would be interested to learn that I live in a nice flat with a kitchen and two bathrooms.

I bored you already about how much of a threat to Yemen's future qat is, but it is amazingly ubiquitous.  I met a guy at a party who told me is the head of a campaign against qat;  I asked him if he was very lonely but he either didn't get it or didn't think it was funny.

Socotra

I did so much work in my first two weeks in Yemen that I absolutely deserved a three day holiday with some friends and colleagues to the island paradise of Socotra.  This is one of the most ridiculous places on the planet - canyons, soaring cliffs, stalactite-sprouting caves and ten-storey sand dunes jostle for position in a landmass that would probably prove to be about the same size as Long Island if I bothered looking it up.

Two hooligans ruining the stunning view of Qalansiya lagoon

Another feature of the island that is a good effort is that a third of its plant life exists nowhere else on earth.  Best are the dragon's blood trees and the desert roses, which I believe were both invented by Salvador Dali.

Desert roses - good for laughing at, bad for hiding behind

A trip on a fishing boat around a headland to a deserted beach was a highlight - turquoise bath-hot water, snorkelling on a reef with parrot fish, watching dolphins doing that cliched dolphin in-and-out-of-the-water thing by our boat, catching plump kingfish for our lunch, laughing at our friend who caught the world's smallest fish in some of the richest fishing waters in the world and playing football on the beach.  Most wondrous of all was how a group of six people could get so sunburnt in so many unusual parts of their bodies.

Some of Socotra's magnificent wildlife

It was fish for every meal, and our guide was even kind enough to take all the bones out after witnessing the chimps' tea party we turned the meal into on the first evening.  You really can't go wrong with fresh fish on the beach, and in fact the worst food we had was two Herculean lobsters we got from a fisherman on day two.

Dragon's blood tree - pretty much the only shade in Socotra

We camped on the beach.  The heat of the sun was such that we were up at about 6 every morning, so we would tend to do a full day's activities, wonder if it was dinner time and discover it was 11.30 am.  We did so much swimming, walking, climbing and vigorous suncream-applying that sleep was never a problem, and the group would drift off on the beach under abundant stars listening to crickets and the sound of one of the group explaining the origin of shooting stars to his neighbour with astonishing inaccuracy.

Off for a swim with a nice sea view.  What a total dump.

Yemen (I think)

Yemen's three favourite things, all rather uncharitably banned from my office

I am in Sana'a, capital of Yemen.  It is no doubt a fascinating place, but I couldn't tell you as security restrictions are such that I am not allowed to walk the 100 yards to work in the morning.  On the plus side my conversational arabic is getting a work-out and I can tell you plenty about the families and home towns or all of our drivers.  The security is justified, as Yemen is currently the kidnapping capital of the world.  Fear not - there are two principal kinds of kidnapping.  The first is courtesy of Al Qaeda, who are so hot right now around here, and let's not think too much about that kind.  Tribal kidnappings, though, are meant to be a right lark - your captors will be demanding the release of a prisoner or a new cinema or free milk for kids in schools, and they will treat you like a guest until their modest demands are met.  One fellow I heard of was even updating his Facebook status while in captivity - I don't know if he even thought it worth mentioning that he had been kidnapped.  Even better is the story of the German chap who was kidnapped about thirty years ago and still goes back to Yemen every couple of years to visit his captors.

In fact, I was probably in more danger in Lebanon, as here there is little chance of getting alcohol poisoning, breaking a leg while skiing or impaling oneself on a bottle of absinthe after slipping while dancing on a bar.

Yemen is the poorest country in the middle east, mostly as far as I can tell due to qat, a leaf that you chew to get high, or to chill out or something.  90% of Yemenis spend about 70% of their time with cheeks full of it, often managing to cram in a cigarette as well.  Government buildings close at lunchtime as the workers usually follow their meal with a bit of a chew, and when they look at their watches it's time to go to work the next morning.  Nearly half of Yemen's water supply goes to watering the thirsty qat trees, leading to predictions of Sana'a running out of water altogether by 2017, a frightening thought that the Yemenis need to chew a lot of qat to forget about.

Beirut

I am reluctant to write too much about what life in Beirut is like, lest I am accused of selling out or murdered by a bitter humanitarian worker who was sent on a deployment where you can't watch rock legends live in concert or drive an hour to go skiing with a sea view.  Therefore I won't mention the Guns n Roses show or the quality of the snow in the mountains.

On my first weekend in Beirut a colleague invited a few of us to watch her judge a tattoo contest in a nightclub.  No tattooing was conducted – instead the contestants revealed their tattoos and explained their origins in the Lebanese mixture of English, French and Arabic.  The more attractive or drunk ones danced about a bit.  There was a stunning likeness of Lenin on one fellow’s shoulder, rubbing cheeks with Che Guevera, and another had Lenin on his chest.  I don’t know if the Beirut tattoo scene is a hotbed of communist thought; in fact the second one could also have been the Argentine footballer Juan Sebastian Veron so I won’t speculate further.

A few days ago the prime minister of Lebanon and his entire cabinet resigned, leaving the country without a government.  Political turmoil is so familiar here that people barely noticed.  Our security detail sent us each a text message warning us of celebratory gunfire from some factions and the other kind of gunfire from the other factions, and advising us to "avoid areas associated with political tension", so I guess we all have to leave the country.

I play football twice a week with a nice group in Burj Al Borajne, where Hezbollah hang out.  Sometimes we hear deafening AK47 fire coming from behind a wall just beyond the touchline, but no one is bothered - it is just an arms dealer testing his wares.

I spent a pleasant couple of days at our office in Qubaiyat, in the hills by Lebanon’s northern border with Syria.  When our field office here has visitors they are put up in the guest rooms of the Convent de la Paix, and I was disappointed not to pass gaggles of giggling trainee nuns on my way to breakfast.

Garish decor in my bedroom at the convent

We are distributing winter clothing and shelter kits to Syrians who have crossed the border in search of a land where bombs don't keep falling on their heads.  Our logistics manager got sun-burnt at a winter clothes distribution recently which made us wonder whether a bikini and flip-flop distribution would be more appropriate, but it still gets cold at night in the mountains.  To try and make it look like I'm actually doing useful work and not just smoking shisha and dancing on bars, here are some photos of a recent distribution in Qubaiyat.

Field Manager Suleiman briefs the team before the mayhem begins

Outside the school and distribution centre, before
this area resembled the mosh pit at a Slayer concert

UNICEF clothes - high on quantity, low on fashion quality

Tarps in hand, boxes of age-appropriate clothes on their way hopefully

Inspecting the wares

2 blankets per child - some of the larger families
had trouble getting all this stash home on the bus

The end of Jordan

On a spare weekend in Jordan I visited Petra, recently voted one of the seven modern wonders of the world along with Ankor Wat and the Taj Mahal tandoori on Peckham High Street.  Modern is stretching it a bit when it comes to Petra which is pretty old by most standards, but it sure is a wonder.  After wandering the mile of the siq, the narrow crack in the rock where it is impossible to proceed without singing the Indiana Jones theme song, the moment where you catch a glimpse of the Treasury, presumably where Petra’s ATMs were, is magical.  The most amazing sight of the day, though, was the lady taking a photo of her son at the opening of the siq with her BACK to the Treasury and lots of tourists in the background of the photo.

Is that an ATM up ahead?

The Nabateans constructed some amazing tombs for their kings in the cliffs, and very efficiently installed a great many cold drinks shacks, souvenir shops and public lavatories nearby.

What the Nabatean kings would have looked like had they been entombed before being actually dead

An impression of a sacrificial victim on the altar at the High Place of Sacrifice

After Petra it was off to Wadi Rum to follow in the footsteps of TE Lawrence and roam the desert with tea towel on head.  Camping with the Bedouin was pretty good, and the scenery is stunning, but the selection of tourist sights on offer are limited to places where Lawrence may or may not have performed various functions.  Our guide also seemed to have little grip of the distinction between the historical character and the film; I think he believed that Lawrence was followed at great speed by a camera crew as he led the Arabs into battle.  Most disappointing of all was that we didn’t even learn where he got the inspiration for Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

This proves that ancient man had no imagination

The next day in Amman it was back down to earth.  The lock to my flat broke and could not be opened from the inside.  I called someone at the office, she called a man and he eventually turned up under the balcony and called for the key to be thrown down.  I reminded him that the door could not be opened from the inside.  He picked up the key, mounted the stairs, opened the door from the outside, came in and shut the door.  There were now two of us locked in the flat.  I was secretly hoping that he would call a friend who would do the same thing and soon the flat would be swarming with prisoners, but we were able to spring the lock quickly and safely with a carving knife covered in butter.

The next day I was called suddenly to Beirut to my great dismay, as I had just purchased a family-sized carnet of bar vouchers for the British Club in Amman.

Amman

After many months of sweating in inhospitable, insecure field locations, I've at last landed on my feet. As I wait for a visa for the inhospitable, insecure land of Yemen I'm holed up in Amman, where the draft beer flows, the range of cheeses in the supermarket is comprehensive and the football pitch at the British Embassy club is of the latest third generation astroturf.

This is actually a place people come on holiday, and the exotic Petra and admittedly inhospitable but still fun Dead Sea await, provided the Yemeni Government are decent enough to delay my visa for long enough.

Last weekend my friends and I visited the car collection of the late king Hussein, who spent so much time buying and racing cars that it's amazing he found any time for ruling. He was the rally champion of all Jordan, which brings the Roman Emperor Commodus to mind.  He lost his first boxing bout, his opponent then accidentally cut his own head off while shaving, and Commodus curiously went the rest of his career undefeated.

We also visited the Roman amphitheatre and Citadel. The latter is most useful as a vantage point for the Giant Flag - no one is quite sure why such a big flag is needed, but its flagpole used to be the tallest in the world before the big-flag-loving Jordanians trumped it with one in Aqaba and then themselves were beaten by a big flag in Tajikistan, the new world leaders in massive flags. That's probably enough about flags.

Outside the Citadel we had various bitter arguments with taxi drivers over the price of the ride - we eventually found a taxi man who refused payment as our destination was so close, thereby proving all the other taxi drivers in Amman to be outrageous liars.

We looked for the national gallery of fine art, but couldn't find it. In my limited Arabic I asked several people for 'the museum of pictures' and all confidently directed us into nearby shops. They would then stand and watch us go, forcing us to enter the shops, where we would ask the proprietor, who would beamingly point us to another shop. Thus did we pass a pleasant Saturday afternoon.

In Amman, the trucks carrying gas cylinders play ice-cream van music. No one has been able to explain this phenomenon.

The King's Harley - Wadi Rum background helpfully provided

If you were the King, your number plate would look like that too

This was hidden behind a Porsche GT and had no blurb, but looks like it isn't
due to be invented for a few years - not sure where King Hussein got it from

How a Roman orator would have looked in the Amphitheatre

Big flag - disappointing lack of wind

Skiing

The Kurdish winter is bitterly cold, so thank goodness I was able to escape it by going up an icy mountain in France for a week of knocking over frozen trees with my face.

Most of my holidaying companions parallel-turned their way out of the womb and think nothing of weaving between spruces as they hurtle down sheer cliffs, but as the closest I'd come to skiing was playing 5-a-side at a sports centre that had a dry slope I signed up for ski school.  I had the misfortune to have borrowed a skiing jacket that was the exact same blend of red and white as the tops sported by the instructors of the Ecole de Ski Francais, and spent the whole week peering nervously over my shoulder, expecting to see a class of French 5-year-olds formed into a wobbly train behind me.  As it was, the only time I was mistaken for an instructor was when an English couple thought I was coming to help them teach their small son to ski, and watched in horror as I wrestled him to the ground in front of them.

Ski school was a lot of fun, although in the most part I think my class resembled the school for retards annual day out.  A would crash into B, knocking him over; C and D would help B to his feet and both fall over in the process; E would come hurtling down the slope and knock A into the pile of bodies.  Our instructor had been instructing in Morzine for 45 years and by the end of the week he could keep most of us upright most of the time, as long as we kept well away from each other.

Patrice and his class - combined experience 45 years and one month

Ski lifts are a source of constant danger, as getting off a four-man lift involves skiing in a straight line down a little slope while essentially forming a quarter of an eight-legged beast.  If any of the beast's components are unsteady on their skis, or waggle their poles a little too enthusiastically, spectacular falls can ensue.  Onlookers will be hoping that the next car will deliver its four-headed beast straight into the chaos.  I was involved in my share of ski-lift accidents, managing at one point to snap my pole between the legs of the unfortunate fellow to my right.  The prize, however, goes to one of my companions, who planted his pole onto the ski of a small child and glided off elegantly while the child went into a tail-spin and buried himself head first into the snow right in front of the next four people to arrive on the lift.

We stayed in a luxury chalet, complete with hot tub and chalet boy and girl who attended to our every need.  This was brilliant, although the hot tub was out of order and the chalet staff toasted the new year with some chemical that required them both to be rushed to hospital just before they were supposed to cook our breakfast.  The man next door came to our rescue and by 9.30am I was terrorising the children on the slopes.

My rusty schoolboy french was wheeled out, with mixed results.  I confused the words 'oreilles' and 'oiseaux' when describing a lost hat, baffling the man in the bureau de lost propertie, who couldn't understand why a hat needed flaps to protect the birds.  On a ski lift with three English people I accidentally answered the question "are you from Morzine?" by saying "yes", was too embarrassed to recant and had to spend the rest of the ride pretending to be a monosyllabic Frenchman.