Iraq and Afghanistan are countries rich in ancient history and the home to some amazing archaeological sites.

But for the past couple of decades, neither Iraq nor Afghanistan have been on most traveler’s list of places to visit. In fact, most countries warn their citizens against visiting either country. And travel guides do likewise…

“Large areas of Afghanistan remain extremely dangerous, particularly during fighting season.” (Lonely Planet)

“Iraq isn’t the world’s most popular holiday destination at the moment. It’s turbulent and extreme domestic situation makes Iraq one of the least desirable places in the world to be.” (Lonely Planet)

Iraq and Afghanistan are making moves to change this.

The Iraq Tourism Ministry recently held a Tourism Fair to promote Iraq. But it was held in the heavily guarded Mansour Melia Hotel, the same hotel, where, just last year, a suicide bomber blew up himself and a dozen other people. Not exactly the best image for a country looking to entice visitors.

And then there’s the Baghdad Museum, which remains closed because of fears that a suicide bomber might pay a visit, something guaranteed to not only destroy the museum’s collections of historic relics, but also kill and maim tourists, the very people the Iraq Tourism Ministry is trying to attract.

Add in the fact that many of Iraq’s ancient sites - such as Babylon, the Arabian city of Hatra, and the Great Mosque of Samarra - have been looted and damaged in the years of fighting, and it’s clear that the Iraq Tourism Ministry has a lot of work to do before a flourishing Iraq tourism industry becomes a reality.

Still, there are some that see Iraq’s tourism potential. Take, for example, American businessman Robert Kelly who is planning to build a luxury $100 million hotel at the edge of Baghdad’s Green Zone.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, the Aga Khan Foundation, a non-governmental organization, is working on establishing the Bamiyan Valley in central Afghanistan as a tourist mecca. Bamiyan is the the place, where, in 2001, the Taliban destroyed two sixth century Buddha statues that had been carved into the side of the cliff.

The Aga Khan Foundation has created the Bamiyan Ecotourism Project to re-develop the areas tourist infrastructure, with the hope of raising awareness of Bamiyan Valley’s cultural, historical, and natural resources. There’s even talk that one of the Buddha statues will be rebuilt.

But simply building hotels and re-opening museums and archaeological sites is no guarantee that tourists will be willing to travel to Iraq or Afghanistan.

Some day maybe, but prehaps, not yet.

Hearing that the Taliban were destroying hundreds of religious statues and temples in Afghanistan in 2001 was a life changing moment for photographer Tito Dupret. Their actions inspired him to document UNESCO’s World Heritage sites in QTVR panoramas. And it has turned into his life’s work. For the past seven years, he has been on the road, traveling from one amazing location to another, camera in hand, determined to create panographies of each and every World Heritage site. So far, 253 of his panographics are posted on the WHTour site that he has been creating.

Panography is what he does and he is good at it. So if you fancy a visit to a World Heritage site but don’t have the time or the money to physically get there, go 360 with Tito instead. It’s the next best thing to being there yourself.

I’ve just been visiting Nubia in Egypt. I stood outside Abu Simbel and did the 360, looking first at the monuments, turning slowly towards the sea. I looked down at sand and up to the towering monuments. I zoomed into and out of the scene as I pleased, like I was holding the camera myself. It truly felt like I was there.

WHTour is one site not to be missed.

So excuse me while I head back there again. It’s time to go inside Abu Simbel…

But first, I’m going to sign up and become a member of WHTours. That way, I can get full screen access to all of the panoramic photographs plus be notified when new panographies appear.

And if you want to know more about the project and the photographer, then have a read of these two interviews:

An Update on World Heritage Traveler and Photographer Tito Dupret

A Conversation with Tito Dupret About His World Heritage Tour

Happy virtual traveling.

I’ve got a bug for old travel books recently. There was Jan Morris — not an old book, but with many older essays in it — and before her Wilfred Thesiger, who makes me wish I could have been an Englishman stationed in Arabia before the Brits and French went in and carved it all up to make weird new countries like Iraq and Iran and basically screw up the rest of the century. It would have been nice to see the land before borders were dropped at the whim of imperialists.

And now I’ve gone further back, to Afanasy Nikitin’s Voyage Beyond Three Seas. Although Nikitin wrote his book in the mid-1400s, my edition is an imaginatively illustrated hardback published in the Soviet Union, complete with request from Raduga Publishers for readers’ “opinion of this book, its translation and design and any suggestions you may have for future publications.” Forget being nostalgic about the world of exploration before the advent of “adventure travel,” that line made me nostalgic for a time when, supposedly, publishers actually cared about the quality and content of what they printed.

Nikitin was a merchant in the 15th century who set out from his native Tver (now located between Moscow and Petersburg) for the reported riches of India, and is supposedly the first Russian ever to have reached India. Evidently, according to the publishers, India and Russia have always had a special connection: “Since olden times the peoples of the two great countries have lived in friendship, showing a keen interest in each other.” Which might explain why the two countries consistently produce more genius mathematicians than the rest of the world combined.

As a travel book, Voyage Beyond Three Seas leaves a lot to be desired by modern standards. There is little dramatic element, and descriptions of vast lands zip by so fast that I had to pull out an atlas and a guide to old city/country names to figure out where in the heck Nikitin had landed this time. Taken in the context of its audience, likely other merchants looking to make the arduous journey across seas and mountains, its descriptive power was considerable: “And near Ceylon precious stones, rubies, rock crystal, agates, amber, beryls, and emery are found. … The harbour of Pegu is not small, and it is mostly Indian dervishes there.”

Your eyes could glaze over reading too much of that kind of listing, combined as it is with enumerations of various fighting forces and servants and retainers and elephants of various leaders and warlords. Like I said, little dramatic element. But reading between these lines, and paying attention, you realize that Nikitin suffered massive hardships in his endeavors to trade the riches of India with the riches of Russia. From being attached and plundered by “pagan Tartars” to becoming madly depressed over his “sinful” decision to give up his “true faith” of Russian Orthodoxy for Islam, you get the impression that Nikitin dragged himself over the seas and land by pure force of will, often hungry, always lonely and desperate to return to Russia, very often nearly losing his life. (Note: the conversion to Islam is unclear, but scholars studying the text have concluded that he very likely did, explaining why he constantly referred to his “sinful voyage.”)

Compare this with the over-hyped experiences of travel writers who throw themselves into possibly life-threatening situations (or at least physically endangering themselves) and then can’t wait to rush home and write about it. Lacking introspection as well as true observation, these books and articles have to hinge themselves on adventure travel because the days of true exploration are over, which, as I’ve mentioned before, can leave a sadder literary landscape.

With a background of a home they will assuredly return to, most travel writers who follow this path fail to reach the desperate pitch of a muted and untrained 15th-century resident lost and hungry in a foreign land, who dragged himself home mile by mile and died before making it back to his hometown. The irony is that, when true adventure was possible, it wasn’t held to be admirable or desirable. Further irony — it’s almost depressing to know that in 2006 an Indian organization retraced Nikitin’s journey … by driving in SUVs.

Nobody sold Nikitin a package tour to India, touting hobnobbing with natives, and the risks he took were not to alleviate a privileged white boy’s malaise, but to expand the glory of his home country and bring something of the outside world back.

Of course, it’s debatable whether real exploration or adventure travel is more desirable. The former very possibly does more damage than the latter, as adventure travel has a vested interest in preserving wilderness and culture. But the writing is another thing entirely. It’s hard to take seriously so much of our modern adventure travel, written as it is with so little knowledge and historical context, when compared with the adventurers and explorers of bygone ages, people with a thirst to learn about a reachable speck of foreign lands, not just the limits of their physical capabilities.

If you’re looking for something to give Istanbul back a sense of flair, a sense of mystery — a sense of Constantinople in fact — Jason Goodwin’s The Snake Stone is just what you need. With impeccable main character Yashim, a plot full of hints and insinuations, and Goodwin’s background as a Cambridge scholar of the Ottoman Empire, The Snake Stone is a delicious read for travelers, mystery lovers, and even armchair historians.

I read a lot of mysteries, but in Goodwin’s first novel The Janissary Tree I found the first new author in a very long time to impress me with storytelling, character building, and a sense of place. In his Edgar Award-winning debut novel, Goodwin introduced detective Yashim, a eunuch living in 1830s Istanbul, who has the ear of the sultan, access to the harem, friends across the social spectrum, and a passion for cooking. It was an excellently written novel in both plot and characters, but its real pull was the image of Istanbul under a sultan eager to reform the Ottoman Empire along European lines.

Goodwin continues this theme in The Snake Stone. Through his fictional accounts, Goodwin aims to give an accurate description of Constantinople on the cusp of turning into Istanbul. Men are abandoning the turban for the fez, and robes for trousers. The old ways are being phased out, and we get to watch the process.

The presence of Istanbul is palpable throughout Goodwin’s writing. And no wonder. Not only is he a scholar, he’s written a travel book based on his epic walk from Poland to Istanbul: On Foot to the Golden Horn, which won the John Llewellyn Rys Prize for travel writing. Goodwin brings his knowledge of and love for the Ottoman Empire to life in his mystery novels. In both books Yashim practically gives readers a walking tour of the Istanbul he knows as he follows hints and clues throughout the city. In The Snake Stone he focuses on the history and mysteries of the Aya Sofia, the beautiful cathedral-turned-mosque in the central city; and makes an unexpected but thrilling detour through Istanbul’s ancient waterworks.

I still think of Turkey as one of the most beautiful and fascinating places I’ve ever visited, but I’d like to go back, Goodwin’s books in hand, and walk the streets of Istanbul with new eyes.

Gary Geddes’s journey traversing Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, the Northern Pacific Ocean, Guatemala, and Mexico, following in the footsteps of a fifth-century Buddhist monk named Huishen, should have culminated in a story that held readers spellbound. Instead — and it pains me to criticize a travel book — the most interesting thing about this recently published tome is its lyrical title: Kingdom of Ten Thousand Things: An Impossible Journey from Kabul to Chiapas.

The concept is fantastic. Following in the footsteps of Huishen, who in the fifth century escaped religious persecution to possibly visit British Columbia long before Christopher Columbus thought he had finally come across India, is an idea to make any publisher jump. It’s a great idea. And Geddes was clearly enthusiastic about Huishen, whom he claims as a thirty-year personal obsession. The travel should have been just as interesting: the trip took Geddes to refugee camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan just before September 11, 2001, and to evocative sections of the Silk Road recently traveled by Colin Thubron.

But any idea can be undermined by a general sense of malaise, which is what haunts Geddes’s book. I started out rooting for him, and I kept trying to rally my attention, but in the meantime found myself skimming entire sections because neither the language nor the experience were enough to hold my attention. Geddes incorporates many elements of good travel writing — dialogue, encounters with locals and other travelers, a good idea, introspection — but just fails to pull them together.

I was left wondering if his own attitude thwarted Geddes’s attempt at an epic journey. When wondering, once again, “what had prompted me to undertake this journey” aside from his interest in Huishen, he observes that, “I am a seasoned, though seldom enthusiastic, traveler. Being on the road heightens my loneliness and, … prompts unfavorable comparisons with the home place. … My ideal version of travel would be to visit exotic places all week long but be back in my own bed on the weekends.”

The sentiment of weariness and frustration is echoed several times throughout the book, and it lies underneath the entire journey, deadening the narrative. A reader can’t get excited about Geddes’s story because, despite his doggedness in seeing his project through, he doesn’t seem terribly excited about it himself.

Being lonely and tired can be themes in a story, too, but the writer has to be willing to give up the narrative line he or she chose in the first place. Geddes refuses to do so, even as it becomes clear that he is unable to pick up Huishen’s tracks anywhere on this long journey. It takes a talented travel writer to realize during their preparatory research that they will not find exactly what they are looking for, but that they can make a story out of what they find instead. Geddes gives us plenty of observations about what he sees, his encounters, and his own mental state, but he fails in the end to pull them together into a thread that will pull readers along.

A good travel book either makes the reader want to see the places for themselves, or makes them feel that they’ve already been. A bad one makes the reader wish they could write the book themselves. Geddes is clearly an accomplished poet. The details he takes in speak of an observer who’s used to paying attention to the small colors and shapes of life that make poetry vivid. Unfortunately, his talents as a poet didn’t translate to either the language or the structure required to make prose gripping.