Capture by A photoblog

Nice to have your photos here Emma. Thanks. I lack the gene for travelling to global hot spots. Hey, I’m even reluctant to travel to America with all their border control rules at the moment.

Glad someone else is allowing us the chance to live vicariously. :-)

Hey, I’m even reluctant to travel to America with all there border control rules at the moment.

See, I wouldn't do that either. And there was nearly a slight fracas in the last night of the tour when I said I wouldn't go to Israel. I probably wouldn't have gone to Egypt had we not already booked the tickets, and yet I'm so glad we did.

I did, of course, take a photo of one of the things we weren't allowed to photograph. One of the twenty or thirty tanks (all right, APCs) around the Egyptian museum. Or, here are some pretty gates and a pretty redhead.

Thanks for doing the hard yards for us Emma! Great windows into other worlds. I didn't deal nearly so well with the Arab world: I would gather a pile of oranges, some rough bread and a good book and hole up in the room for a couple of days and escape and gather my strength for the next round. ( I spent a few months travelling rough around Morocco in the 80s: adventuresome and exhausting.)

I didn’t deal nearly so well with the Arab world

I am glad we chose to go with a guided tour, particularly in Egypt. Not only was it more secure, it meant we weren't wasting energy on customs and taxis and dodgy guides.

But I started to get sick towards the end, and spent our last two, "extra" days in Amman basically asleep in my hotel room. And there were a couple of times along the way I dipped out of activities just to get some time alone.

I would still like to go to Morocco.

In my yoof I would have rather crawled over broken glass than go on a guided tour. Now -- whether it's wisdom or loss of bottle -- I would seriously consider it for some parts of the world. I have always loosely planned a route based on things I wanted to do, caught a plane and started from there. I believe Morocco is somewhat more tourist-friendly now, but I would treat the risks with rather more respect than I did.

Wish we'd gone on a guided tour in Syria. The service taxi ride from Amman to Damascus in 2008 was hair-raising. At one point the driver was texting on two phones at once and steering the car with one knee. He also overtook on the dirt verge while doing 160km/h. Stuffing packs of cigarettes down my socks for the border crossing into Syria was almost comic relief after that.

Love your last 3 shots Emma. Particularly the Donkey and it's setting.

can I use the LAV?

a photo of one of the things we weren’t allowed to photograph....

Great (or is it grate?) that you also caught the overbearing baleful batrachian gate guardians, one in full wide-mouth frog form!
Like painting gun emplacements in butterfly wings...

Re Morocco - I spent 4 weeks there in early 1978 and it was a blast! We were just a VW-kombi full of youngsters all keen to smoke loads of hash and see Morocco.
We drove from the Spanish enclave of Ceuta down & across going through Tetouan, Casablanca, Rabat & Essaouira before having a few days just north of Agadir. Heading inland & north to Marrakech then on to Fez & Meknes. It was a real fun trip with lots of freedom camping, lots of getting stoned and some wonderful memories.
I would heartily recommend it, even now.

With my wife we had a trip planned when we were in the UK in 2001, looking at Essaouira and Marrakech as a 2-centre holiday and then 911 happened & we had to shelve it as the muslim world wasn't at all inviting for a while. Went to the south of Sapin instead - Seville is also a lovely spot!