Some of my friends refer to me as the rainmaker: wherever I go it always seems to rain. In 2005 I spent the whole year travelling – shooting a book on Islands around the World. In all but one of these places I saw some rain. Sometimes just a few minutes – other times a few days. I have been to supposedly drought-struck Ethiopia three times, and been rained on each time! Sod Bob Geldoff, what Ethiopia really needs is me. I might not be able to feed the world, but I can certainly make sure that it is watered!

I mention this because I am currently in Marrakech, and after four clear and sunny days, it has just coded over and delivered a short sharp shower, which has sent everyone running for cover.

Marrakech is a cool place – just three hours from London, and still steeped with the mysticism of North Africa. It also has a good sprinkling of spas and decent restaurants to help the style-conscious traveller recover from a day pounding the unbelievably sprawling souk desperate to discover something that they actually want. As well as the miles of tourist tat, there are spice markets, selling all manner of medicinal herbs and spices (and even tortoises and chameleons as pets as well as worryingly a number of leopard skins)

The main square in Marrakech is the Jemaa el Fna which loosely translated means ‘the place where tourists come to watch Moroccans in funny hats mistreating animals and small boys’. Actually in means assembly of the dead, which sounds tremendously nihilistic.

All manner of crazy north African entertainment is on show here: snake charmers torment reptiles, including stuffing them in glasses of water, and shoving eggs in their mouths – then introduce them to captured chipmonks presumably to prove they are still poisonous (I didn’t wait around to find out). Caleche drivers whip aged horses to a gallop, and enterprising fellows walk around with barbary apes on chains and force them to pose with tourists. Later in the evening, young boys are encouraged to box to the delight of the locals who crowd around like they are watching a playground fight. On a non-animal theme, old water sellers dressed up in pom-pom hats and African drummers with hat tassels charge for photos. At night, scores al fresco foodstalls spring up, selling freshly cooked seafood and grilled meats.

Update: I have just got back from a particularly damp evening stroll and a selection of food from these stalls and it is still raining. But I am not worried. Luckily I invested in the Time Out Guide to Marrakech for this trip. They started off as the London weekly listings magazine and have no diversified. into guidebooks with a particular emphasis on funky lively places that people go to for long weekend breaks. Now someone I was speaking to yesterday who made the mistake of buying the (Australian) Lonely Planet guide told me that there were no bars in the ancient and holy Medina, which makes up the centre of Marrakech. My Time Out guide lists five – six if you count the Kosybar, which is mainly a restaurant. Let that be a lesson to you: buy British. We always know where to get a drink, and what to do when it rains!

Words and pictures © Steve Davey 2008

The death of Sir Edmund Hillary has prompted remembrances across the globe, from the BBC to World Hum. The most common word used? Inspiration.

Journalists, politicians, and travel writers worldwide are talking about Hillary’s thirst for adventure, his ranking among the great explorers of our planet, his determination and skill, and how these qualities have inspired adventurers and travelers and mountain climbers for decades.

There are two things bothering me about the accolades. The first is epitomized by the remembrance on BBC America last night, a flashback to the Queen’s Coronation Day and the announcement that “Everest has been conquered.” Our way of thinking about nature, mountains in particular, hasn’t changed much since 1953. The thought of “conquering” Everest still gives thousands of people a thrill every year, their fascination etched in heart-stopping detail in Jon Krakauer’s book Into Think Air. We’ve only recently allowed the concept of humans being part of nature creep back into our mindset.

Don’t get me wrong. I love hiking, and have even been known to climb a few mountains. But the challenge implied in the word “conquer” has always confused me. Why does nature have to be something you have to beat? Oh, sure, I know, people now say it’s all about the personal challenge. But it’s not. Not if you look at the language used to describe intrepid travelers chuffing up unmoveable peaks or baring their teeth against raging rivers. “I’ll beat her if it’s the last thing I do” pretty much sums up the attitude.

Sir Edmund Hillary had a better understanding of his relationship with the natural world. Yes, he wanted to climb Everest “because it’s there,” but he also had a reverence for it. He respected it. The generations of climbers who came after him to throw their trash at the mountain’s foot and have Sherpas drag them up to the top just to say they’d done it annoyed the heck out of him.

But more importantly, travelers and adventurers for decades now have missed Hillary’s most important work: not conquering Everest, but using all that skill and determination and passionate drive, as well as the influence he gained through being a public figure, to try to improve the lives of those who lived in Everest’s shadow.

The inspiration here is not about throwing yourself into a foreign world, or against a death-defying natural force, but in realizing that to go is no longer enough. Anybody can go. Anybody can travel. Anybody can come back with fascinating personal experiences and a new understanding of the world around them. But there are few people (Kira Salak is one) who take that extra step that brings travel beyond a selfish personal interest. Until we start seriously exploring space, the age of exploration and adventure is over. It’s humanity that needs exploring, not quirky customs of foreign cultures; the search now is for solidarity.

That’s the true legacy of Sir Edmund Hillary. It’s not enough to climb the mountain, to go home and write your book and pay your bills and nestle back into your consumer society. If you’re intrepid enough to pull yourself up Everest, you can use that energy and determination to make a difference in the lives of the people whose cultures so fascinate you.

It must be the New Year, because I wanna clear stuff out.

I want it gone; recycled, donated or sitting at the curb, out of the house.

I’m getting rid of the gomi (trash.)

In Japan, the everyday sorting and organizing of your gomi is a big deal and very complex.  There are special bags for certain items, particular days to put each item out for pick-up, and specific hours of the day when you can put it out.

Directions for all this are provided, written in kanji, of course. 

Good luck with that. 

When I lived in Japan, most other Americans around me were quite flummoxed by what went into which bag when, despite their best efforts to sort it all out. 

Very early January, though, was a gomi bonanza of good stuff, because the Japanese are all about “out with the old, in with the new” to start shogatsu, the new year with fresh, new items.  Still-working appliances, TV sets, audio/visual gear, kitchenware, etc., often in excellent condition, are dispatched to the curb as gomi.  

I knew many Americans who had quite a streak of Yankee thriftiness and simply couldn’t pass up the chance to liberate “perfectly good things going to waste.”  No one ever said we couldn’t pick up gomi, but somehow we just knew that our very regimented, orderly  Japanese neighbors would be pretty horrified.  There was a lot of surreptitious driving around in the wee early morning hours, jumping out and grabbing things from the curb and then driving home to gloat.

British expat Nick Ramsay toted trash around for literally years before he figured out what to do with it.  Expat w00kie’s Japanese apartment building was drowning in garbage by January 2nd, because of oddly-scheduled early January trash services.

For those who miss the chance to shed gomi in January, don’t worry.  The Japanese festival of Setsubun (also called “bean-throwing”) is coming up in early February, and it’s good for getting rid of mental gomi.  

Setsubun traditionally features ceremonies to toss out evil influences in the form of special fuku mame beans, and then shout “Fuku wa uchi!” to welcome in good fortune.  Some temples and shrines have a bonfire, and you can buy wooden items to represent the year and then toss that “year” and its trials or tribulations into the bonfire.

All of your troubles, up in smoke.

In his most recent column, Ask the Pilot’s Patrick Smith addresses the air travel topic that has become a frighteningly real prospect over the last couple years: relaxation of the cell phone ban on airplanes (mobiles to you Brits).

It’s a simple column — subtitled “Are cellphones and laptops really dangerous to flight?” and addressing a variety of electronic devices — that nevertheless makes me wish I hadn’t had my morning coffee. Then my stomach wouldn’t feel cold with fear and I could pretend that the prospect of mobile phones being used on airplanes is just a bad dream. “Alas,” says Smith, “I fear the regulations are destined to change at some point, and cellphone use will become commonplace at 35,000 feet.”

What, what are airlines thinking of, even toying with the idea? It’s not the marginal silly buggers the phones might play with an electrical system that bothers me. It’s the very real, very significant hell they’d play with passengers’ already overstretched psyches. It’s the last straw.

The seats are too small for anyone who’s not a Lilliputian. The food on many flights (even across the US, which can take as long as flying to Europe from New York) is almost nonexistent. People are too fat, too smelly, too whiny, too perfumed, too sharp-elbowed, and too weak in the bladder. Sometimes the bathroom doesn’t work. Sometimes you get banged by the beverage cart. The air is too hot, too stuffy, too cold. The pillows have as much neck support as a diaper. Babies scream, bringing that particular blood vessel to dangerous pulsing point in many overfed businessmen. The coveted leg room of the emergency exit row always goes to either the teenager who spends the safety talk listening to his iPod, or the many-skirted woman who doesn’t speak English.

And yet still we fly. Still, mostly, we manage to hold it together just long enough to get off the claustrophobic, uncomfortable contraption. Still, we manage not to kill one another on planes. If airlines decide to add cell phones to the mix, our last shred of humanity might just boil up and evaporate while we’re still stuck on the tarmac.

The usual arguments in favor of mobile use on planes always circle back to the same idiotic mantra: we need it for work. Need to make business calls, catch up on email, keep the economy greased.

Oh, yeah? Greased with what? More useless, time-wasting meetings? Claptrap. I don’t buy it. Most businesspeople I know are grateful to have un-linked time on the plane when they can catch up on — gasp — work. Sometimes sleep, but mostly work, when they aren’t interrupted constantly. This harebrained argument reminds me of one of my favorite quotes, from mystery author Laurie King: “Brains are wasted on men. All they use them for is playing games and making money.” They’re certainly wasted on the people who think this is a good idea.

Cell phones already manage to drive people nuts on commuter bus and rail trips. Britain’s flirtation with the “quiet car” on trains often serves only to give passengers something to grit their teeth about, a reason for the headache when they come home. Do airlines really want to see the underslept businessman or the mother trying to escape for a quiet weekend suddenly snap, and turn frothing at the mouth to the people who simply will not shut up?

Maybe you’re better than that. Maybe you’re just coming back from your eye-opening year teaching English in Korea, or chasing yogis in India, or breathing in the clean air of the African desert. Maybe you’ve got that extra modicum of inner stillness that lets you om past the overused perfume, the screaming baby, the extra flesh in your seat, and the man who needs to call every person on his contact list and the girl who needs to relate her last date in detail. Loudly. So everyone knows how important they are. But when you get on the plane after your rediscovery of your inner soul, the two or three hundred people around you might already be pushed to snapping point. Do you really want to be on that flight?

Welcome to the first tips and links round-up for 2008.  We’re off and running with some new year goodies:

**  Last month’s issue of Perceptive Travel magazine featured a great Norway article, Notes Towards a True Historie of the Vikings,  so this travel deal caught my eye and I wish I’d posted it sooner — a Norway musical cruise later this month with live performances by the Norwegian National Opera.  More recently:  the Guardian’s Insider’s guide to Oslo and Instant weekend - Tromso.

**  Yep, it’s true — Hello Kitty’s gone macho.

**  My community on Twitter is hand-selected by me (no biggie, everyone picks who they want to follow, that’s what personalizes it for you.)  Since I tweet back and forth across time zones with Aussies like blogging evangelist Duncan Riley, digital creative guy John Johnston and ProBlogger Darren Rowse, I’ve started paying attention to Australian travel links in case I ever get to visit Down Under.   How about 36 Hours in Melbourne?  If you’re traveling with kids, consider Away games, the family-friendly side of Melbourne, from the Sydney Morning Herald. 

**  If you want to escape the winter above the equator right now and get warm in Oz, the 4-Hour Workweek author Tim Ferriss writes about Endless Summer: How to “Winter” Like Old Money.

**  Another bloggy/Twitter colleague, PR and media expert Geoff Livingston, returns from Christmas trip to Cairo with six reflections from Egypt.

**  Speaking of warmth, here’s what Gabriela Quintero  (half of the awesome guitar duo Rodrigo y Gabriela) has to say about her Mexican hometown, Zihuatanejo.  If you move fast, you can get your Mexico travel questions answered tomorrow, January 8th, by Budget Travel’s Trip Coach.

**  Travelers, think about unplugging and reclaiming “dead time,” even on long Andean bus trips.

**  What’s new in Eastern Europe and Central Asia?  How about Kosovo as a travel destination, and a Gadling breakdown of the ‘Stans - Kyrgyzstan , Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan.

**  Lonely Planet has a short update on the precarious travel situation in Kenya, and BootsnAll contributor Kesse Buchanan has some insights from the Kenyan campaign trail.  Also in Africa, how about this….a Holiday Inn opens in Soweto, South Africa.

**  In U.S. travel tips and news, the New York Times Frugal Traveler visits Santa Fe, NM (and did not have the service problem that I experienced on my visit,) a Missouri girl who is now a travel editor gives us the scoop on great coffee, gyros and falafel in St. Louis, MO,  you can check out some honky-tonkin’, boot-scooting Central Texas dance halls,  designer Isaac Mizrahi dishes his fave flea markets and somebody finds one of my favorite little Florida towns, Micanopy. 

**  Finally, nice to see that US border/immigration officials can, in fact, be quite pleasant.