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

Somewhere in the muddle of the dreaded holiday season, I managed to fit in a Doctor Who marathon as an antidote to a suddenly colicky baby. Thank you, BBC America! Between the Doctor and Torchwood, I need never watch bad American sitcoms again. That is, if they’d stop giving us neverending episodes of “You Are What You Eat” and “Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares.”

Since the real BBC seasons are far ahead of what is shown on BBC America, the season finale of Doctor Who on this rebellious side of the pond was the one where the Cybermen cross universes and surviving Daleks emerge from the Void to battle each other — lots of fun when sci-fi’s biggest evildoers run around (or zoom around) chanting “Delete” and “Exterminate” at one another. Of course, the good Doctor sends them both back to the Void, or hell. And he repeatedly tells people traveling to different universes themselves of the damage they’re doing to their respective realities. “You can’t cross universes,” he says.

But what if you could? You know all those glossy travel mags, the ones with a smashing beach or mountain climbing photo on the front that advertise “10 Best Places to Escape” or “5 Undiscovered Islands” or “The World’s Best Climbing Challenges?” What if instead they read “5 Undiscovered Realities,” “Your Life: 10 Exciting Alternatives,” or “Our Picks: The Best Untouched Universes.”

Even lifestyle magazines could chip in. Women’s: “What if you had married your high school sweetheart? One inter-universal traveler’s story.” “Career or Kids? Investigate your options in other realities!” And men’s: “What if you hadn’t gotten her pregnant?” “Meet the stud you really are!” “Stunted careers: find out where you went wrong.”

The Doctor Who episode, while fanciful, is based on a very real theory called the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, which isn’t expressed quite so simply as, “Every single choice you make births a new universe.” But close enough.

Think of the travel opportunities! Instead of teaching English in Korea, you could teach American English in a reality where the American Revolution had never happened. Instead of being awed by increasingly empty Gothic churches leftover from a world dominated by Catholicism, you could shiver in — and then safely leave — a universe in which the Roman church and the Inquisition gained power rather than lost it. Or travel by buggy in an existence in which the steam engine was never invented. Or slip secretly across to watch what would have happened with her/him if you had made the right move at the right time.

Where would you go?

Yesterday NPR had one of the strangest travel stories I have yet come across — a new spa resort in North Korea. Mount Kumgang, North Korea, is an unabashedly consumerist and touristic resort built with money from Hyundai, and offers a retreat for South Koreans looking for natural landscape beauty as well as the normal amenities of a resort spa. That is, if you don’t mind going through the DMZ and skirting the land mines on either side of the road. “Just getting there involves busing through the demilitarized zone, where we are constantly told ‘no pictures, no pictures’ by our guide and informed that aside from the road we are on, the entire area is filled with land mines,” reports the CNN journalist who also made the trip. And if you don’t mind being entirely fenced in and heavily guarded from the local population.

The question is, why would the average South Korean make the trip? NPR producer Madhulika Sikka says that it’s often a symbol to South Koreans of what they see as the inevitability of eventual remerging of the two countries. And, of course, there’s always the true traveler’s answer: because it’s there.