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.

Sometimes things happen to remind me what a tin-pot little country this is.

The United Kindom is awash with news that “a minor member of the royal family” has been the victim of an attempted blackmail plot concerning cocaine and alleged oral sex with an aide. Apparantly the two would-be blackmailers have been arrested and the case first came to court in secret weeks ago. There is apparantly a gagging order (no pun intended) which effectively stops anyone in the UK from finding out the identity of the errant royal.

This appeared to be earth-shattering news with speculation running wild, until the Palace stepped in pointing out that it was a minor royal and one who could not claim to be HRH (His or Her Royal Highness). This effectively ‘outs’ the person in question: there are only around 30 members of the Royal family, and if you take of those who should be addressed HRH, then the short list is, well, short!

The court order prevents me from actually naming the guilty party, but by now, international publications will be naming them to choruses of “who?”, “oh yeah!” and “big deal!”

Now I don’t buy into the hysteria on drugs, or sex for that matter. I couldn’t give a stuff if a member of the royal family is allegedly caught face down in a pile of nose-bag after copping off with a member of staff. My real beef is the difference in the way that rules are applied to Them and the rest of us!

When working-class icon and party girl Kate Moss was allegedly photographed ‘powdering her nose’ the pictures were all over the UK press. There was outrage in the home counties (our version of the US bible belt). She lost lucrative modelling contracts, was threatened with a child welfare investigation and interviewed by the police. All on the strength of a photograph, which would never be evidence in court and only proved that she sniffed an unidentified white powder.

What I can’t understand is why the ‘unidentifiable royal’ should not face the same Spanish Inquisition. If you are blackmailed, does that make you less guilty of the ‘crime’ that you were alleged to have committed? Why should their identity be protected where “Cocaine Kate’s” was not? If she had been blackmailled over the pictures, would she now be protected? Will the police be investigating the underlying claims of royal cocaine abuse?

In reality, this is a case of the privileged position the British Royal Family. I use the phrase British loosely. Our lot are in fact all German, except the Queen’s husband Phil the Greek, who is Greek! The current queen is a descendent of the German House of Hanover, who took over the British monarchy from the Scottish House of Stuart in 1741. The House of Hanover became the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha after the death of Queen Victoria. It imaginatively changed it’s name to the House of Windsor during the First World War, when the British, didn’t want to be ruled over by German monarchs! Their surname effectively changed from Battenberg to Windsor after their favourite castle!

There is a perception in the Union (of England, Scotland and Wales) that the English dominate, yet the last English monarch was Elizabeth 1. After she dies in 1603, the throne passed to James IV of Scotland and England became a subjugated nation under the Scots, until the Germans took over!

Why does all of this matter? Well the United Kingdom labours under a system called Constitutional Monarchy, where we get to hold a democratic vote for the House of Commons, the second house, the House of Lords is appointed (until a few years ago it was hereditary, with the ruling classes appointed by past monarchs having a major say in the laws of the land) and the monarch has to give Royal Assent to any laws, and has the power to dissolve Parliament.

Monarchists cite that the last time this actually happened was in 1708, but the fact is that this power exists, and it means that a member of the German Royal Family (which was part of the Austrian and Russian dynasties, whose family spat started the First World War, which led to the Second World War and the Holocaust, the formation of Palestine and arguably the rise of Islamic Terrorism) has the power to overule the elected Parliament of Great Britain!

Remember that when the British governemt claim to have gone into Iraq to bring democracy. We do not have true democracy in the United Kingdom, and what I find truly offensive is that the vote of an Iraqi insurgent means a little bit more than mine.

I have to confess that I look on myself as well-travelled. Last year I did the equivalent of 7.5 times around the world, yet I have to take my hat off to Jason Lewis, who has just completed his first time around the world. Unlike me, Jason didn’t take one flight – hell he didn’t even take a car – and it took him 13 years! A true explorer (and probably a certifiable nutter), Jason has just completed the first human-powered circumnavigation of the earth. En route he battled a crocodile, stormy seas and even pirates! When he started, there were few websites, though thankfully he has caught up with an expedition site on www.expedition360.com.

Jason, I salute you!