On the 14th February a young writer called Max Gogarty, published the first of a weekly blog Max, 19, hits the road on the Guardian Unlimited website about his pending trip to India and Thailand. Maybe it was the fact that the blog came out on Valentine’s Day and lots of the readers hadn’t had a card! Maybe it was the fact that it was so badly written. Maybe it was the fact that the blogger is a young relation of a regular writer for the Guardian and his blog whiffs ever so slightly of nepotism. Whatever the reason, the shit truly hit the fan!

Within minutes there were dozens of hostile comments posted dismissing both the writer and the Guardian. One comment summed up the general feeling:

“Hooray! Just what is needed. Another blog by a posh boy related to a Guardian employee to keep us all up to date with his adventures in places that millions have experienced already. Wow, what a bright idea.”

The next day, the story was even covered on daytime TV, and prompted a response from the Travel Editor, Andy Pietrasik, defending his young writer. Even the editors response got hundreds of hostile comments.

One of the things that struck me about this story was just the volume, and indeed the quality of some of the comments. Some were borderline investigative journalism on their own. Readers quickly linked Max to his father, freelance journalist, Paul Gogarty, and questioned whether he got the job this way. One posted a link to a five year old story by Peter, hinting that this wasn’t even going to be the first time in Thailand for Max! In light of the apparent nepotism, someone even posted a link to a page on nepotism on the Guardian Jobs website! On the same day, someone had even posted a parody blog, Wayne Type, 19, Hits the Road.

I have to say that I generally agree with the comments on the website. This isn’t the first time that someone posh, well-connected and vacuous has been given the space to write over cliched un-insightful drivel about Asia in a way that belongs more in a travel brochure than a serious travel publication. Yet, as an occasional blogger, I did feel some sympathy for Max, who was just doing his thing - even if his thing should never really have reached such a wide audience. If Max had posted on a personal blog, no-one would really have objected, or even read it for that matter.

Most of all though, I felt a twinge of jealousy: how come Max, 19, gets so many comments? Skipping back over the last few months of the PT Blog, I have realised that maybe we need to be more controversial, and edgy. I toyed with the idea of following the Guardian nepotism path and getting my 14 month old daughter to write a blog, but I have decided to opt for the easy way out:

I would like to formally state that anyone reading this blog is a complete tosser - now come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough!

Proving that my blog posts are like busses - you wait for ages and then three come along at once, it was reported in the UK’s Daily Mail over the weekend that British Olympic Athletes have had a clause added into their contracts forbidding any political dissent at the Beijing Olympics.

Mindful of not wanting to insult the Chinese government, athletes have been forced to sign an amended contract stating that they will not publicly comment on China’s Human Rights record, or their shameful invasion of Tibet. The Daily Mail has likened this instruction to the one given to the England football team to give the Nazi salute when playing at an international in Berlin in 1938, and used this picture, previously unpublished in the UK, as an illustration.

Bearing in mind that the Dalai Lama has called for peaceful protests at the Beijing Olympics, over the issue of Tibet, then it seems that the British Olympic Association is siding WITH the Chinese Authorities AGAINST the exiled spiritual leader of Tibet.

Interestingly the British Prince Charles has indicated that he will not attend or support the games, although his niece, Zara Phillips (Granddaughter to the Queen) will be forced to sign the contract if she does attend the Olympics. That could be an interesting debate over the family dinner table!

Most travellers know that possession of cannabis has been decriminalised in Amsterdam, and that you can consume small amounts in coffee shops with impunity, yet most people wouldn’t be so dumb as to try to take some home.

Fewer people might know that the mildly addictive herb Khat (or Qat) that is widely consumed in North Africa and Arabia is also legal in the United Kingdom, yet many people have been arrested taking it from there, to other countries in Europe.

Yet did you know that if you take a common painkiller that contains codeine (which can be bought over the counter all over the world) or certain cold and flu remedies, and then fly through the United Arab Emirates even days later, you can be locked up for a mandatory four years for possession of a banned substance?

The BBC News website is reporting a number of worrying cases where people have fallen foul of the stringent UAE drug laws, which are backed up with very sensitive detection equipment.

Substances - even miniscule amounts - can be found on your person, or even through blood or urine samples! A British man is facing four years in prison for having 0.003g of cannabis stuck the the sole of his shoe - an amount weighing less than a grain of sugar, and invisible to the human eye! Even more bizarrely, a Swiss National is currently serving four years in prison, after three poppy seeds from a bread roll which he ate at Heathrow airport were found on his clothes!

The organisation, Fair Trials Abroad, has a list of pharmaceuticals and medicines which are banned in the UAE. Even if you study this list, and stick to it for weeks before your departure, I would have to say, why bother? With recent studies finding that 99.9% of UK banknotes and 94% of Euro banknotes carry traces of cocaine, then the only safe advice for travellers must be to avoid ALL travel to the UAE, or even changing planes in Dubai or Abu Dhabi, lest you might end up with the mother of all plane delays - four years in the slammer! You have been warned!

Firstly sorry for the extended silence. I have been up to my neck in a couple of new book projects, and have let things slip. This hasn’t been helped by the number of people who contact me about working for them, and expect me to work for free! Seriously! One guy hasn’t got the budget to pay me to write a story for his (very large) magazine, so he expects to be able to interview me for all of the information and write the story himself. Another wants me to act as a consultant for his company in return for lunch. Things have got so bad I have even put a page up on my website to direct people to, when they suggest such things, complete with a link to a fantastic Harlan Ellison You Tube interview.

I used to be a member of the Royal Geographical Society in London. This august organisation was responsible for many of the world’s great explorers before the National Geographic Society was even a yellow border in it’s founders eye. This was where the great explorers used to come to announce their discoveries to an expectant world. In the end I let my membership lapse because I kept missing meetings when I was overseas, and when I was in London I never seemed to get round to it.

Still, there were some amazing speakers, and the sad death of Sir Edmund Hillary last month, reminded me of a talk I attended by the first man to climb Mount Everest. No this wasn’t Sir Edmund, but a mountaineer and author called Tim Macartney-Snape. Not as you might expect a raving lunatic, Macartney-Snape was apparently the first person to climb Everest FROM SEA LEVEL! He started on a beach in the Bay of Bengal, walked all the way to Everest, climbed it without oxygen, then walked back to the coast! This phenomenal achievement was carried out in 1990, and was the inspiration behind his Sea To Summit clothing and survival gear range.

Ignoring the current libel case between Macartney-Snape and elements of the Australian media (largely because despite reading his website I am still at a loss as to what it is all about), I have to say I do have sympathy with his Everest claims. I mean, how far up a mountain do can you start, and still claim to have climbed it. If you fly to Lhasa, and then get a 4WD to base camp, you might still have to do the hard bit, but mountains are measured from sea level after all! If I got helicoptered to within 50 metres of the top of Everest then hiked the rest of the way, would I too be a summiteer?

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