Open skies | October 2011

E VERY ROLE X IS MADE FOR GRE ATNE S S. THE DAY-DATE II, L AUNCHED IN

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EDITOR’S LETTER

A

dventure means different things to different people. To some, it means abseiling, bungee jumping, snowboarding or white-water rafting.

I find that a rather dull definition of what adventure is; for me it means something that combines dislocation (geographic, not physical), a small element of danger and preferably some stunning scenery. This has resulted in me hiking in Afghanistan and northern Iraq, trekking through Ethiopia, diving off the coast of Djibouti and meeting militants in Lebanon, the West Bank and the Philippines. Adventure can also mean doing the

unexpected, such as when a fortysomething fashion maven decides to tackle the Hindu Kush, one of the wildest mountain ranges in the world.

The typographic cover, designed so brilliantly by Mitch Blunt, is another attempt at doing the unexpected.

Someone else who marched to his own beat was Sean Flynn, son of the legendary actor, Errol. He had a Hollywood career laid out before him, but became a war photographer instead and disappeared in communist-held Cambodia while chasing a story. His friend and room mate in Vietnam, Perry Deane Young, tells us his story. We also feature two cities that are off the beaten track, for very different reasons, but are beautiful in their own way. Sana’a is a city unlike any other, and Tim Macintosh-Smith explains why the Yemeni capital is so magical. Another place that defies categorisation is Pyongyang, the otherworldly North Korean capital. Charlie Crane’s stunning photography captures a place frozen in time. Enjoy the issue.

CONOR@OPENSKIESMAGAZINE.COM

Emirates takes care to ensure that all facts published herein are correct. In the event of any inaccuracy please contact The Editor. Any opinion expressed is the honest belief of the author based on all available facts. Comments and facts should not be relied upon by the reader in taking commercial, legal, ďŹ nancial or other decisions. Articles are by their nature general and specialist advice should always be consulted before any actions are taken.

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29

CONTENTS

OCTOBER 2011 OUR MAN IN CHITTAGONG REPORTS ON THE CITY’S SHIP BREAKERS

(P37)... WE SHOWCASE SOUTH-EAST ASIA’S DIVERSE DIVING SITES (P41)... WE GET THE SCOOP ON EVELYN WAUGH’S CLASSIC YARN (P43)...

COPENHAGEN GETS THE MAPPED TREATMENT AS WE DISCOVER ONE OF THE COOLEST CITIES IN EUROPE (P44)... THE ADVENTURE MOVIE GENRE HAS HAD A SOMEWHAT CHEQUERED PAST (P48)... WE GO SEARCHING FOR STYLISTAS ON THE STREETS OF SAN FRANCISCO

(P58)... DUBAI HAS A NEW CULTURAL HUB. WE INVESTIGATE THE SHELTER, THE UAE’S NEWEST HOT SPOT (P62)... NURISTAN IS ONE OF THE WILDEST PLACES ON THE PLANET. ERIC NEWBY’S HILARIOUS ACCOUNT OF HIS TRIP THERE IS A TRAVEL WRITING CLASSIC (P70)...

A SNAKE, SOME DJINNS AND A CITY OF MAGIC. TIM MACINTOSH-SMITH TELLS US A SANA’A TALE (P80)... WE LOOK AT THE LIFE AND

DISAPPEARANCE OF ERROL FLYNN’S SON, SEAN (P88)... A PHOTOGRAPHIC JOURNEY THROUGH NORTH KOREA’S SURREAL CAPITAL REVEALS SOME OF THE PEOPLE WHO LIVE THERE (P96)...

31

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CONTRIBUTORS

MITCH BLUNT: Mitch is an English illustrator who has worked with clients including The Atlantic Monthly, Breo Watches, Google and Wired. Mitch is planning on moving to Seoul next year to mix things up and push the idea of working as a freelance illustrator to the limit.

DAYNA EVANS: Dayna lives in Chittagong, Bangladesh, and has written for a variety of websites, including the Sundance Channel.

She has a degree in creative writing from NYU and is currently on a 10-month Asian trip.

TIM MACINTOSH-SMITH: Tim has lived in the Yemeni capital, Sana’a, for the best part of three decades. He is the author of the prize-winning Yemen: Travels In Dictionary Land, and a trilogy of travel books following Moroccan globetrotter Ibn Battuta.

PERRY DEANE YOUNG: Perry was friends with Sean Flynn, who went missing during the Vietnam War. His account of Flynn’s time in Vietnam, Two Of The Missing, perfectly captured the madness of the time. He is also a playwright and historian.

CHARLIE CRANE: Based in London, Charlie has won numerous awards for his photography and has also directed a number of TV commercials. He has won a Bronze Award at the British Television And Advertising Awards.

33

INTRO ØÜ º P. ÙÖ º Asian diving

P. Û× º Dubai’s new hub

P. 64 º Istanbul booty

CANADAED CONNECOTNE OF

R WE DISCOVE Y’S MOST R T N U O THE C R WALKWAYS SPECTACULA

P60

35

OUR MAN IN

CHITTAGONG BANGLADESH’S SHIP GRAVEYARDS ARE PROFITABLE, BUT DANGEROUS, ENTERPRISES

N

ine men, all wearing dirty button-down shirts, are pulling a metal rope aggressively while chanting a Bangla “heave-ho!”

The rope slackens and tightens when the men throw their bodies backward in an attempt to get leverage on the metal ship part they’re pulling toward the shore.

The part is 10 times their size.

It’s rusted, decrepit, and its prior purpose is hard to identify, but they pull it anyway. This giant ship part is going to make somebody a great deal of money.

The ship breaking yards of Chittagong span the Bay of Bengal’s shores and are home to hundreds of ships, thousands of men, and millions — sometimes hundreds of millions — of dollars in gain. The 8,000-tonne German ship that is being dismantled piece by piece was purchased by the yard’s manager and investors for $40 million. Its metal parts will be broken down, thrown into a furnace, and melted into highly profitable steel rods, while everything else – from the ship’s toilets to its bedspreads – will be

sold in market stands on the road out of the yards. The economy of this bayside city thrives off the ship breaking industry and employment has steadily been on the rise since many of the yards opened, this one in 1986.

While it is understood that all quick-money industries inevitably have a dark side, the ship breaking industry has many.

While I watched men scale 50foot hollowed-out ships barefoot and shirtless, a yard manager explained how his yard is run.

The workers – none of them are younger than 18 – work eight-hour shifts, and they get paid a dollar a day. He says it with a straight face, yet I find it all so hard to believe. While I walk around taking pictures, adolescent faces smile back at me and their elder companions look worn and tired.

The life of a ship breaker – dismantling enormous ships with only a blowtorch and rudimentary tools – is not glamorous or lucrative.

A man fell to his death from the top of a 60-foot ocean liner in mid-August and is only one

of at least 50 who will die from the profession this year. But as the yard manager says, “ship breaking is creating jobs”.

What it is also creating, however, is an influx of environmental issues. When the ships come into port to be disassembled, they do so at full speed, crashing toward shore and leaving toxic waste behind them.

In order to be approved for dismantling, the authorities have to check for hazardous materials first. However, corruption is rampant; the yard manager said no ship had ever been denied.

Hazardous chemicals are left to poison the waters, while managers and investors pull in profit. All around, there are men using blowtorches without masks, operating machinery without gloves, and trudging through sand and muck that is littered with rusted slabs of scrap metal. I ask this yard’s manager if purported new health and safety regulations will help. “ The workers have little money, little health. We are changing this so they can have good futures.”

Dayna Evans is an American writer based in Bangladesh.

37

GRAPH INFORMATION ELEGANCE

38

39

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41

BOOKED

EVELYN WAUGH – SCOOP

T

h is is Evelyn Waugh

at his playful best; a comic novel of exquisite proportions set in the fictional African state of Ishmaelia, where the protagonist, William Boot, is sent to cover a war. Boot, a timid 22-year-old nature columnist with no journalism training, has been mistaken for a novelist of the same name. No matter, for he gets the ‘scoop’ the book is named after, despite arriving in Africa with no ideas and “a quarter of a ton of luggage”. The book is based on Waugh’s own experience covering Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia for The Daily Mail. His view of the newspaper business is not hard to decipher: cowering hacks placating press barons, lying, inebriated reporters and above all, the need for ‘news’, no matter whether it be fictional or real. The name of Boot’s paper says it all: The Daily Beast .

These themes have been covered countless times before and since, but never with such deft handling.

Waugh throttles his subjects with a velvet glove, which makes up for the (at times) slow pacing of the book. A master at work .

Secker & Warburg, 1958

ROOM

356

FRANKFURTER HOF

FRANKFURT, GERMANY

INTERNET SPEED: 2MB, $20 per day PILLOWS: Four IPOD DOCK: Yes CLUB SANDWICH DELIVERY TIME:

22 minutes COMPLIMENTARY SNACKS: Tea &

coffee, fruit, sparkling water TOILETRY BRAND: Bulgari DAILY NEWSPAPER: None EXTRAS: CD/DVD player, TV in

bathroom, walk-in wardrobe BUSINESS CENTRE: Yes VIEW: 3 /5 RATE: From $250 WWW.STEIGENBERGER.C OM/ FRANKFURT

There are very few hotels with the history of the Frankfurter. Set in the heart of a very modern German city, its iconic entrance dominating the Kaiserplatz Square, the property combines old world (huge rooms and corridors) with the new (Wi-Fi and a business centre). Downstairs the Restaurant Français (replete with one Michelin Star) edges out onto the street, its famous red canopies a Frankfurt landmark. The service is, as to be expected, excellent; the rooms are what you would expect from a turn of the century hotel: lush carpets, antique light fixtures and teak desks. The property was a makeshift hospital during the Second World War, and the sense of history is everywhere. It may not be the city’s hippest hotel, but it’s certainly the grandest.

43

MAPPED COPENH AGEN

Denmark packs both substance and style into its rather compact capital, Copenhagen. Made up of centuries-old architecture juxtaposed against sleek new builds, fashionable foreigners love it as much as locals for its fine-dining restaurants, design stores and everything in between. Nick Clarke highlights this autumn’s must-see sights.

WWW.HG2.COM

44

HOTELS 1. Nimb

2. The Royal Hotel

3. D’angleterre

4. Avenue Hotel

RESTAURANTS 5. NOMA

6. Fiskebaren

7. Umami

8. MASH

BARS / CLUBS 9. Ruby

10. Simon’s Nightclub

GALLERIES 13. The Danish Natl. Gallery

14. V1 Gallery

11. Jolene 15. Frihedsmuseet

12. Vega Natklub 16. Galleri Bo Bjerggaard

45

MAPPED COPENHAGEN

HOTELS 1 NIMB

Framing the famous fringes of the Tivoli Gardens, Nimb may only have 14 suites but what it lacks in lodgings it makes up for downstairs with four restaurants and two sleek bars.

2 THE ROYAL HOTEL

3

D’ANGLETERRE As famous as the clientele that stays here – Hans Christian Andersen included – this is Copenhagen’s undisputed super-stay: steeped in more than 250 years of history.

4

AVENUE HOTEL Found in leafy Frederiksberg, it’s housed inside a 19th-century townhouse with 68 rooms. There’s no restaurant,but there’s a breakfast room, a patio and a buzzing bar.

7

UMAMI The cuisine is high-end Japanese served up with a French twist: seared foie gras with eel and sake-steamed mussels are must-tries. Go on a weekend night when the DJ spins funky tunes.

8

MASH MASH is a carnivore’s hunting ground: the mouthwatering menu is meat-centric, with bloodthirsty diners gorging on doorstep-sized steaks accompanied by sumptuous sides.

Danish designer Arne ‘Egg Chair’ Jacobsen put the finishing touches to this iconic building back in 1960. 606 is the only room in which Jacobsen’s classic original décor remains.

RESTAURANTS 5 NOMA

Here, in a converted 18th-century warehouse, Nordic nosh with an emphasis on local ingredients is served up.

Understated interiors allow the food to take centrestage.

6 FISKEBAREN

Found in the trendy Meatpacking District, Fiskebaren is one of the city’s hottest tables. And it’s not hard to see why.

Danish seafood is the order of the day: the fish and chips is excellent.

BARS/CLUBS 9 RUBY

Hidden behind the façade of an 18th-century apartment building, Ruby is hard to get in.

But once you’ve got in, you enter a space of high ceilings, Chesterfields and bookcases.

10 SIMON’S NIGHTCLUB

Relatively new kid on the block, Simon’s is housed in an old art gallery. There are dwarves behind the bar and ballet dancers on the dance floor. Extremely hard to get in, but worth it.

11 JOLENE

Found inside a converted slaughterhouse, Jolene is open for free Wi-Fi hawks during the day and underground scene queens by night. It’s small, intimate and attracts a crowd of hipsters.

12 VEGA NATKLUB

1990’s stalwart Vega is as popular now as it was back then: and for good reason, comprising a network of concert halls, nightclubs and bar in one circular, brick-built venue. Bags of character.

GALLERIES 13 THE DANISH

NATIONAL GALLERY 700 years of cultural history are packed in to Copenhagen’s largest museum, and visitors line up to view everything from installations to abstract photography.

46

14 V1 GALLERY

A haven for younger artists in Copenhagen, V1 is the perfect platform for new talent. White walls and a concrete floor allow the art to do the talking, most of which is quite inexpensive.

15 FRIHEDSMUSEET

Proving once and for all that size isn’t everything, this small museum in Churchill Park tells the touching story of Denmark’s courage during WWII: a very poignant place.

16 GALLERI BO

BJERGGAARD Just recently relocated to the Meatpacking District.

Inside this hip gallery is European art from the late 20th-century with a particular slant on photography and video.

FLICK CELLULOID DISSECTED

e

r u t en

dv A es v o L l d o owel o w P y l k r l Ho By Ma y Wh

D

iscuss adventure movies today, and it’s highly likely that the first titles to spring into your conversation will be the gigantic summer blockbusters that inevitably surf in on a wave of shark-eyed merchandise tie-ins.

Lunchboxes, action figures and video games are all now regular precursors to the actual premieres of these films: Jurassic Park, Pirates Of The Caribbean and Harry Potter.

These movies are CGI extravaganzas, filmed on vacant sets in front of giant green screens, with 90 per cent of their visual fireworks edited in after the actors have performed their action sequences and moved on to other projects. Adventure films of the modern era are pretty

48

much wholly reliant on a series of staggeringly costly illusions. But was this always the case?

Well, not exactly: back in the genre’s initial 1930-40s era, even the most swashbuckling epics still knew a thing or two about keeping it real.

Errol Flynn, Clark Gable and Tyrone Power were the stalwart adventure heroes of the day, fending off waves of cannonballs, poisoned arrows and love rivals in titles such as The

Black Swan, The Mark Of Zorro and Adventures Of Don Juan.

Stunts and effects have always been part of large-scale moviemaking, but those early forays into macho fantasy were a far cry from our modern obsession with schoolboy wizards. So how did we

get here, and have we lost some of that grittier early spirit of adventure along the way?

Investigate the evolution of the genre through the 1950-60s, and you’ll still spot plenty of familiarsounding titles in the early years — films such as Treasure Island and Ivanhoe all stuck to the motifs of moustachioed swordsmen, smouldering damsels and wild beasts.

But then things change; by the mid1950s, we see films such as Forbidden Planet, The Time Machine and Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea. As the rate of scientific progress exploded and humankind’s journey into the oceans and space ploughed onward, Hollywood tried to stay ahead of the curve.

ILLUSTRATION: SACHIN TENG

From the mid-1960s until the early 1980s, one name became synonymous with the blurring of the lines between adventure and fantasy — that of animation genius Ray Harryhausen.

His trademark stop-motion visual effects now perfectly demonstrated the increasing power of cinema to act as a mirror for even our wildest flights of fancy: during this period, key Harryhausen movies like Jason And The Argonauts, The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad and Clash Of The Titans gradually became the standard at which all adventure epics felt compelled to aim.

The influence of this era on cinema has never really faded. It’s obvious across the Indiana Jones titles —

arguably the most iconic of the genre’s latter-day franchises. As techniques have evolved yet further, so too have the environments and enemies our modern heroes struggle against.

Couple that with a growing industry realisation throughout the 1980s and 1990s that merchandising to young cinemagoers was more lucrative than the movies themselves, and it’s only a short hop, skip and jump to the position we find ourselves in today.

While it may be easy to lament the apparent shift in fashion away from the real-world settings and historical overtones of golden era Hollywood adventuring, it’s important to note that we’re now in an enviable position of choice: for every Avatar, there’s

been a Ridley Scott/Russell Crowe reboot of Robin Hood; alongside each successive Harry Potter, we’ve had new versions of Gulliver’s Travels, Conan The Barbarian , and yes — even Clash Of The Titans.

In fact, it seems the biggest threat to the whole adventure genre at the moment comes from mainstream cinema’s increasingly maddening obsession with remakes.

If CGI is the one force in Hollywood currently encouraging us to push out and beyond into previously uncharted territory, then we arguably owe it a debt of gratitude in retrospect.

3D, on the other hand… well, that’s a bile-flecked rant for another issue altogether.

49

SKYPOD DUBAI-BASED SOUL AND JAZZ VOCALIST RACHAEL CARRADINE PICKS HER PLAYLIST

HUMAN NATURE — MICHAEL JACKSON This song has such a beautiful melody. I love the way Michael sings it, what a talent he was.

THE SUN RISING — THE BELOVED I remember in the late 1990s, BBC Radio One played this song during a solar eclipse just as sun came back out — it was magical!

TANTO TEMPO — BABEL GILBERTO This whole album is just so chilled out but Tanto Tempo is my favourite track. It reminds me of one of my sisters back in the UK. It brings back some hilarious memories too.

IT’S MY LIFE — TALK TALK I listen to this when things start to get me down. It’s a great uplifting tune and the video, with all the animals running around, is fabulous.

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THE PLANET SUITE — GUSTAV HOLSTE This was my first proper introduction to classical music.

My dad had it on vinyl when I was very young. If you listen carefully you can hear how it influenced all ‘space’ theme tunes since, including Star Trek and Star Wars.

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I KEEP FORGETTIN’ — MICHAEL MCDONALD The groove of this song is so cool; I also love the way it lifts in the bridge. I’m a fan of anything he does, but this song is one of my favourites.

PORTUGUESE LOVE — TEENA MARIE Anyone who’s into soul, hip hop or R&B should definitely listen to Teena Marie’s material. She broke down many walls with her incredible voice and was one of the only white artists signed to the Motown label back in the day. This song is the obvious choice.

NEGGHEAD — POINTLESS PRESSURE I love this track because it’s from one of my favourite labels (www.waxonrecords.com) and I often have it playing on repeat.

Good vibes.

I AM THE BLACK GOLD OF THE SUN — ROTARY CONNECTION The vocals on this track are incredible. The Nuyorican Soul version is great too, but the original is still the best, Minnie Ripperton is amazing. Les Fleurs is another great tune of theirs too.

COULD YOU BE LOVED — BOB MARLEY I picked this song, but I really could have picked anything by Bob Marley. I used to play his Natural Mystic album on repeat. Think I’ll dig it out and get to know it again.

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LOCAL VOICES

HOW TO ACCESS OUR INNER STRENGTH

FEELING THE FEAR

WAEL AL SAYEGH WONDERS WHERE THE ADVENTUROUS SPIRIT OF PAST GENERATIONS HAS GONE TO

ILLUSTRATION BY VESNA PESIC

D

o you ever wonder why tomato juice tastes so much better on a plane and why some movies make far better sense when viewed 30,000ft in the air? Ever thought about why five minutes feels like 10 when you’re travelling?

When we travel, we are reunited with our ‘adventurer selves’. With destination set and path determined, our senses are heightened, our souls tuned to the frequency of the expanding universe. We are aligned with its flow, its energy, its force. We feel at home.

One of the most respected European adventurers ever to visit Arabian sands was Sir Wilfred Thesiger (1910-2003). What made Thesiger different from other travellers was his true adventurer’s spirit. He didn’t come to teach us how life should be, but instead embraced our way of life and journeyed

alongside us. He was a student of our land and our people; he came to learn, not to preach, he came to explore and discover, not to sow and reap. In return he was given love, respect and even an Arabic name, Mubarak Bin London.

I was privileged to be amongst the few students in my school who had the chance to meet this legendary man and hear him speak.

The brief encounter was memorable. His tall stature and distinctive nose gave him great presence in a culture where these features are much valued. His eyes were almost hypnotic, past the stage of having any distinct colour.

The wrinkles on his hands and face resembled the ripples of the desert sands of the Empty Quarter, which he managed to cross twice.

The pictures of him on our school walls showed him in full Bedu attire, and with his beard, turban, a chain of 53

camels, and a khanjar (Arabic dagger) proudly strapped to his waist, it was almost impossible to think of him as being non-Arab.

In fact, it wasn’t until we were told who he was — an adventuring Englishman from Oxford — did we come to understand that he was an outsider. His key message to the gathered students has remained with me ever since; ‘Don’t lose what your grandfathers had’.

Thesiger was referring to our ancestors’ way of life, one that had

adventure and exploration at the very heart of it. Whether on land or at sea, the element of the unknown was present. Pearl divers would annually take part in expeditions that meant they had to live on a boat for almost half the year.

Storms and piracy were an everyday hazard. The Bedu, with their ‘desert ships’, would cover long distances every day with the threat of invading tribes and robbers, all the while battling the environmental challenges of some of the world’s most hostile terrain.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the many threats and risks of that time, our grandfathers and grandmothers lived every moment in the present and thus fully tasted and appreciated life in a way our cursing, mall-hopping generation finds hard to fathom.

Our grandparents were financially poor compared to us today, but they were far richer in personality and charisma.

They were thin and lanky, but they could handle all the pressure

A BRIEF HISTORY OF EXPLORERS

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1304

1454

1788

1813

Ibn Battuta was the original globetrotter, setting off from Morocco in 1325. He travelled through North Africa, the Middle East and China, eventually returning home 29 years later. The veracity of his writings has been questioned, but no one doubts his wanderlust.

Something of a workaholic, Amerigo Vespucci was a navigator, financier, cartographer and an explorer. The Americas are named after him, which might explain why Columbus had some issues with him.

An Italian icon of exploration.

The interpreter and guide for the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Sacagawea has long been a symbol for American women and Native Americans. She was kidnapped twice as a child, but survived; and took part in one of the country’s great historical moments.

David Livingstone was a Scottish missionary who popularised the ‘scramble for Africa’ with his journeys across the continent.

His religious zeal was combined with a Protestant work ethic. He died in Africa, aged 60, riven with malaria and dysentery.

LOCAL VOICES

life could throw at them with a smile and a twinkle in their eye. Their souls were tempered by the adventurer way of life.

All of us, Arab or not, still have access to this tempered inner strength, even in our modern age.

The only thing standing between us and our ‘adventurer selves’ is a four letter word: Fear.

Today, most of us live in the warmth of our own comfort zones, so much so that when fear knocks on the door we mistake it for an

enemy instead of recognising it for what it is, a source of an emotional energy that can help us live the life of the adventurer.

If unutilised, this energy roots us to the ground and we become chained to a life of no surprises, no excitement and ultimately no happiness. This is, unfortunately, all too common in the modern world.

When we adventure, we break this cycle. Fear is the fuel that helps us do that. Fear is the best friend an adventurer has.

That is why travelling and adventure are seen by many cultures as a spiritual journey and not merely physical transportation from point A to point B. The great mystic poet Rumi called the holy voyage into adventure ‘Night Travelling’, where the word night is used to represent our fear.

Adventure is a purifying experience because it propels us outside what is comfortable to where real living begins. This is something we should all try and experience.

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1887

1923

1934

A true Renaissance Man, William Beebe was a biologist, explorer, naturalist, author and ornithologist who helped popularise scientific writing in the early 1900s. His deep sea diving and field trips mark him out as one of the world’s first conservationists.

The first woman to fly over the North Pole, Louise Arner Boyd, was also a polar bear hunter, an avid Arctic explorer, and one of the first people to conquer the icy swathes of Greenland. She was honoured by the American and Norwegians and is revered to this day.

The ultimate American hero, Chuck Yeager flew for more than 60 years and was the first person to break the sound barrier in 1947. He flew missions in WWII and Vietnam and his deep, soothing drawl has been mimicked by pilots worldwide. A legend.

Yuri Gagarin was the first man to journey into outer space, and became a Soviet hero after he landed in 1961. His mission sent the Americans into a panic and started a full scale battle to explore space. Gargarin died seven years later when his MiG jet crashed.

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INTERVIEW

MY TRAVELLED LIFE BENEDICT ALLEN, 51, E X P LO R E R

half months and I only came across mainly

ON TROUBLE

ON KIT

indigenous people. Being totally alone is

The only trouble I ever seem to have from

I always have a survival kit around my waist,

hard, but those are the survival situations

humans are when encountering other people

with things such as waterproof matches,

you find yourself in. The thing with survival

like me, not adventurers, but outsiders.

a spare compass. I also have a special white

situations is that life is beautifully simple –

Opportunists such as loggers, drug runners,

penknife, which is easier to find at night or in

all you have to do is get out of them.

gold miners – have been a big problem.

tropical places, which is where I tend to go. I have two young children now, so I take photos of them with me to remind myself what I am

ON CLOSURE

ON EXPLORING

coming back to. If you are ever in a bad posi-

Including my last book, Into The Abyss,

While I was at university, I kept trying to find

tion you need to have something to fight for.

I have written 10 books. The writing is

ways that would allow me to be an explorer.

the closure of each expedition; I have to

I knew I wasn’t cut out for the army, and

get everything out of my system. After

I didn’t have any money – but I thought

ON ISOLATION

the physical bit, there is the mental bit –

that there must be a way. There are people

I have gone 30 days without seeing a person

writing about your findings. That’s what

living in Borneo and in the Amazon who

before. In terms of ‘civilised’ people, crossing

exploration is about; building on people’s

don’t have any money either and I thought

the Amazon basin took me seven and a

knowledge of places.

I could live with people like these, and that is how the expeditions came to pass.

I turned to local people in places we would consider inhospitable.

ON THE LOCALS When I put myself at the mercy of the local people they were incredibly hospitable – even people in the towns would warn me that there were wild cannibals that would eat me.

But no matter where I have been, people would welcome me. I was no threat, I didn’t usually have a gun – I was just by myself.

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IMAGE: MICHELLE LEE

STORE U R BA N C ARTO G RA P H Y « SHELTER « DUBAI « CREATIVE SPACE

D

ubai is known for many things — big buildings, big brands and big money — but not as a creative hub. At least not yet.

But there is a change afoot in the dusty industrial area of Al Quoz, where the well-hidden collection of innocuous warehouses known as Al Serkal Avenue has already become home to a number of art galleries. Now, twin brothers Rashid and Ahmed Bin Shabib – editor in chief and publisher of local bi-monthly art magazine Brownbook respectively – have moved Shelter, which Rashid describes as a gathering place for creatives to share ideas, to the area.

Shelter originally opened in 2007 in another, more isolated, Al Quoz location, but the brothers have been looking for the opportunity to move to the heart of the creative community for the past four years.

“We always worked closely with local galleries, and our remoteness in the old space was counterproductive,” says Rashid. “Clusters work better for projects like this, and the community is very happy with the move.”

The brothers enlisted the skills of Japanese architect Takeshi Murayama to create a functional yet environmentally sensitive space within an existing warehouse.

“We’ve used OSB boards made up of wood debris,” says Rashid. “That element of recyclability and avoiding waste is very much in line with our philosophy. A lot of people preach, IMAGE: BA HR AL ALUM KARIM

62

whereas we are really doing it.” The result is an impressive two-floor, modular wooden house construction within what is a typical warehouse space, built of recycled wooden sheets with a number of glassless windows cut into them. There is also a bookstore, a café and a library.

“Takeshi Murayama’s work is very distinctive,” explains Rashid. “His style is rooted in Japanese architecture — minimalism, usability of small spaces and functional pockets, all of which you see at the new Shelter.”

The upper floor features a small meeting room and desks for creatives to come in between 9am and 6pm to work on their laptops, study for exams or plan their next project, with the more open downstairs space set aside for film screenings and a programme of educational seminars — a major focus for the Bin Shabib brothers.

The topics of the monthly seminars range from independent fashion and retail across the Middle East to publishing, food and farming.

“Education is a big part of what we do,” says Rashid. “They will be held three times a week and will be free to all.”

And with Shelter also looking to hold 30 events in collaboration with local creatives, the space will provide a welcome boost to the creative scene.

Shelter, Warehouse 30, Al Serkal Avenue, Al Quoz, Dubai, (971) 4 3809040; www.shelter.ae

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1

BOOTY I STA N B U L

WE BAG HALF A DOZEN QUIRKY KNICK KNACKS IN THE CITY’S BAZAARS

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3

Backgammon Board, $12.

An entertaining café pastime or an attractive and quirky coffee table trinket.

Haci Bekir, Turkish Delight, $12.

The locals call it lokum, and Haci Bekir makes the best in the city. Delicious.

Vintage Watch, $18.

You might need to wind it every 10 minutes, but it’s definitely an original.

The Grand Bazaar,

Hamidiye Caddesi 83,

Çemberlitas

Çemberlitas

Eminönü

The Grand Bazaar,

3 2

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4

5

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Turkish Coffee Set, $26.

Enjoy Istanbul’s best coffee in in the comfort of your own home.

Retro Orient Express Film Poster, $4.

A reminder of travel’s glory days for your study wall.

Medicye Mah Hazine SK,

Atatürk Fridge Magnet, $1.

Say hello to the father of the Turkish nation every time you go to grab the milk.

Kurukahveci, Tahmis Sokak,

2/A Ortaköy

Ortaköy Sunday Market

66 Eminönü

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5

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4

M on

Su n

Sa t

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CALENDAR

SAHARA RACE

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Adventurers take to Cairo as they race across 250km of desert. www.racingtheplanet.com

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u Th

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MIDDLE KINGDOM, MIDDLE EAST The first Chinese art exhibition in Dubai will feature 25 works of art. www.galleryetemad.com

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New York hosts one of the largest popculture geekfests in America. www.newyorkcomiccon.com

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ATP WORLD TENNIS FINALS The top eight players in the world play each other in London. www.barclaysatpworldtourfinals.com

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24 IBA ANNUAL CONFERENCE The International Bar Association’s annual conference takes place in Dubai. www.ibanet.org

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w

ith all the lights on and the door shut to protect us from the hellish draught that blew up the backstairs, the fitting room was like an oven with mirrors. There were four of us jammed in it: Hyde-Clarke, the designer; Milly, a very contemporary model girl with none of the normal protuberances; the sour-looking fitter in whose workroom the dress was being made; and Newby.

Things were not going well. It was the week before the showing of the 1956 Spring Collection; a time of endless fittings, the girls in the workroom working late. The corsetmakers, embroiderers, furriers, milliners, tailors, skirt-makers and matchers all involved in disasters and overcoming them – but by now slightly insane.

‘You MUST stand still dear; undulation will get you nowhere,’

Hyde-Clarke said. He stood up breathing heavily and lit a cigarette.

There was a silence broken only by the fitter who was grinding her teeth. ‘What do you think of it now, Mr Newby?’ he said. “It’s you who has to sell it.’

‘Much worse, Mr Hyde-Clarke.’

(We took a certain ironic pleasure in calling one another Mister.) ‘Like one of those flag poles they put up in the Mall when the Queen comes home.’

Hyde-Clark was already putting on his covert coat. ‘We’ll try again at two.

I am going to luncheon’. He turned to me. ‘Are you coming?’ he said.

We went to ‘luncheon’. In speech Hyde-Clarke was a stickler in the use of certain Edwardianisms, so that beer and sandwiches in a pub became ‘luncheon’ and a journey in his dilapidated sports car ‘travel by motor’.

As we batted our way up Mount

Street through a blizzard, I screeched in his ear that I was abandoning the fashion industry. ‘I saw the directors this morning and told them I had just had a book accepted for publication.’

‘It isn’t true is it? I can hardly visualise you writing anything.’

‘That’s what the publishers said, originally. Now I want to go on an expedition.’

‘Aren’t you rather old?’

‘I am just as old here as on an expedition. You can’t imagine anything more rigorous than this can you? In another couple of years, I’ll be dying my hair.’

‘In another couple of years you won’t have any to dye,’ said Hyde-Clark.

On the way back from ‘luncheon’, while Hyde-Clarke bought some 71

A SHORT WALK

Scotch ribs in a fashionable butcher’s shop, I went into the Post Office in Mount Street and sent a cable to Hugh Carless, a friend of mine at the British Embassy, Rio de Janeiro. CAN YOU TRAVEL NURISTAN JUNE? It had taken me 10 years to discover what everyone connected with it had been telling me all along, that the fashion industry was not for me.

Hugh Carless. Who had replied so opportunely to my cable, entered the Foreign Service in 1950. The son of a retired Civil Servant, he is, like so many Englishmen, in love with Asia. For a time he was posted to the school of Oriental Studies, from where he emerged with a good knowledge of Persian; then to the Foreign Office, from which he frequently disappeared on visits to industrial plants; once he went down a coalmine.

His Persian being both fluent and academic, he was lucky to be posted to our Embassy in Kabul where he could actually make use of his talents. Hugh had subsequently been transferred to Rio de Janeiro, but the seed [of Afghanistan] had been planted.

Hugh’s telegram [agreeing to the Nuristan trip] was followed by a great spate of letters, which began to flow into London from Rio. They were all at least four pages long, neatly typed in single spacing – sometimes two would arrive in one day.

They showed that he was in a far more advanced state of mental readiness for the journey than I was. It was as if, by some process of mental telepathy, he had been able to anticipate the whole thing. It was all heady stuff, but then, quite suddenly the tone of the letters changed.

I don’t think we should make known our ambition to go to Nuristan. Rather I suggest we ask permission to go on a 72

Climbing Expedition. There are some good and unclimbed peaks of about 20,000 feet, all on the marches of Nuristan. One of them, Mir Samir (19,880) I attempted with Bob Dreesen in 1952. We climbed up to some glaciers and reached a point of 3,000 feet below the final pyramid. A minor mishap forced us to return.

He was already deeply involved in the clichés of mountaineering. I reread his 1952 letter and found that the ‘minor mishap’ was an amendment.

At the time he had written ‘one of the party was hit on the head with a boulder’; he didn’t say who.

I was filled with profound misgiving. In cold print 20,000 feet does not seem very much. But I had never climbed anything. I had never been anywhere that a rope had been remotely necessary. It was useless to dissemble any longer. I wrote a letter protesting in the strongest possible terms and received by return a list of equipment that I was to purchase.

Many of the objects I had never heard of: two Horeschowsky ice-axes; three-dozen Simond rock and ice pitons; six oval karabiners (2,000lb. minimum breaking strain); five 100ft nylon ropes; six abseil slings; Everest goggles, Grivel, ten point crampons; a high altitude tent; an altimeter; Yukon pack frames – the list was endless.

It was the second week in May. I was leaving in a fortnight. To add to my troubles I now received a letter from Hugh. It was extremely alarming. I read it to Hyde-Clarke.

‘These three climbs will certainly be a good second-class mountaineering achievement. But we will almost certainly need with us an experienced climber.’

‘I thought you said he was an experienced climber.’

‘So did I.’

Eric Newby and Hugh Carless travelled to Istanbul, before setting off by ferry and then by car to Tehran, and eventually to Meshed in the south of the country.

A little beyond Meshed we stopped at a police post in a miserable hamlet to ask the way to the Afghan Frontier and Herat. I was afflicted with the gastric disorders that were

we passed through but not feel it and the only smells were from the fumes of our exhaust and the foul pipes; vistas we would have gladly lingered over had we been alone were gone in an instant and forever. If there is any way of seeing less of a country than from a motorcar I have yet to experience it. The air was full of dust and, as the sun set, everything was bathed in a blinding saffron light.

I re-read his 1952 letter and found that the ‘minor mishap’ was an amendment. At the time he had written ‘one of us hit on head with boulder’

to hang like a cloud over our venture.

Hugh seemed impervious to bacilli and, as I sat in the vehicle waiting for him to emerge from the police station, I munched sulphaguanadine tablets gloomily and thought of the infected ice cream he had insisted on buying at Kazvin on the road from Tabriz to Tehran. Five miles beyond the police post the road forked left for the Afghan Frontier.

It crossed a dry riverbed with banks of gravel and went up past a large fortified building set on a low hill.

But whoever was driving seemed possessed of a demon who made it impossible ever to stop. Locked in the cab we were prisoners. We could see the country

There was not a house or village anywhere, only a whitewashed tomb set on a hill, and far up the river bed, picking their way across the grey shingle, a file of men and donkeys.

Here for me, rightly or wrongly, was the beginning of Central Asia.

Now the country was wider still, the road more twisting, with a range of desolate mountains to the west dimly seen in the flying sand. The only occasional people we met were

73

A SHORT WALK

roadmenders, desiccated heroes in rags, imploring us for water. To the left was the Hari-Rud, a great river burrowing through the sand, and we pointed to it as we swept past, smothering them in dust, but they put out their tongues and waved their empty water skins and cried ‘namak, namak’ [water, water] until we knew the river was salt and were shamed into stopping. At times the river was so insubstantial that it tapered into nothingness, sometimes it became a lake, shivering like a jelly between earth and sky.

Sixty miles farther on we arrived at Herat. On the outskirts of the city, raised by Alexander and sieged and sacked by almost everyone of any consequence in Central Asia, the great towers erected in the fifteenth century by Gauhar Shah Begum, remarkable wife of the son of Timur Leng, King Shah Rukh, rose into the sky. Only a few of the ceramic tiles the colour of lapis-lazuli, that once covered these structures from top to bottom, still remain in position.

By the time, later that day, we left Herat it was dark. All night we drove over shattering roads, taking turns at the wheel, pursued by a fearful tail wind that swirled the dust ahead of us like a London fog. If it had been possible we should have lost the way, but there was only one road. It seemed impossible for the road to get worse, but it did: vast pot-holes large enough to contain nests of machinegunners; places where it was washed away as far as the centre, leaving a six-foot drop to ground level; things Hugh called ‘Irish Bridges’, where a torrent had swept right through the road leaving a steep natural step at the bottom; all provided a succession of spine-shattering jolts.

Whereas the previous night we had 74

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A SHORT WALK

only met two lorries in the hours of darkness, there were now many monster American vehicles loaded with merchandise to the height of a two-storied house, each with its complement of piratical-looking men hanging on the scramble nettings, who jumped off to wedge the wheels on the steep gradients, while the passengers huddled together, making the crossing on foot, groaning with apprehension. Sticky with melon we arrived at a town called Girishk on the Helmand River. There, under a mulberry tree, squatted the proprietor of a chaikana, a

avenues, newly asphalted, past Russian steamrollers still ironing out the final bumps, to the principal hotel. We were five days late. It was Friday, 5 July, 1956. In a month we had driven nearly 5,000 miles. Our journey was about to begin.

We left Kabul on 10 July. Our destination was the Panjshir Valley and The Mountain. The last hope of recruiting an expert mountaineer had now expired. During our short stay in the capital we had been extremely discreet about our capabilities or rather our lack of them, but still no one had come

He was a fine-looking bearded man, nearly always a bad sign in Asia, where fine looking bearded men leave you in the lurch at the worst times

long-headed grey-bearded Pathan, chanting a dirge on the passing of a newly founded civilization, no new thing in this part of the world.

He railed against the Americans until the oil lanterns that were tied to the trees began to flicker and go out one by one.

“You will be in Kandahar in two hours,’ he went on. ‘The Americans built the road; they have not taken that away.”

It was as he said. The road was like a billiard table. The following morning we arrived in Kabul and drove down the great ceremonial

76

forward. With us in the vehicle were Ghulam Naabi [a local cook Carless had used on a previous expedition] and one of the private servants from the Embassy, a fine-looking bearded man with loyal eyes. This is nearly always a bad sign in Asia where fine-looking bearded men with loyal eyes have a habit of leaving you in the lurch in the most inconvenient moments – but this particular specimen really was faithful. The road climbed a pass where gangs of

Hazaras, round-headed Mongols in the uniform of the Afghan Labour Corps were widening it, using Russian steamrollers. Immediately the lugubrious air that hangs over the visitor to Kabul in an almost visible cloud was dispelled, and we entered the Koh-i-Daman, rich upland country. Our spirits rose.

Now that we were near our destination, Ghulam Naabi began to identify the scenes of the various mishaps that had overtaken him and Hugh on the road when they were last there in 1952. “Here I was overset in a lorry with Carless Sahib.”

“You never told me that,” I said to Hugh. “It was nothing, the driver lost his head. Ghulam Naabi was a bit shaken, that’s all.” Another mile. We ground up a really steep piece covered with loose stones.

“Here we had a puncture.” A little farther and we reached a place where the radiator had boiled over. It seemed impossible that such a short distance could encompass so many misfortunes. I asked Hugh about the passes into Nuristan.

“Don’t mention the word Nuristan when we come to hire the drivers, otherwise they won’t come. They’re terrified of the place.”

A SHORT WALK

Newby, Carless and their guides did eventually reach the Hindu Kush, but their multiple attempts to climb Mir Samir, an unclimbed glacial peak of 20,000 feet, ended in failure. After a series of near misses, brushes with death, sickness, unfriendly natives, and hostile conditions, the two inexperienced climbers turned back towards the Panjshir and Kabul. As they returned they came across one of the world’s great explorers: Wilfred Thesiger.

We crossed the river by a bridge, went up through the village of Shahnaiz and downhill towards the lower Panjshir. “Look,” said Hugh, “it must be Thesiger.”

Coming towards us out of the great gorge was a small caravan. We had been on the march for a month. We were all jaded; the horses were galled because the drivers were careless of them and their ribs stood out because they had been in places only fit for mules. The drivers had run out of tobacco and were pining for their wives; there was no sugar, no jam, no cigarettes and I was reading The Hound Of The Baskervilles for the third time; all of us suffered from dysentery. The ecstatic sensations we had experienced at a higher altitude were beginning to wear off. It was not a gay party.

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Thesiger’s party consisted of two villainous-looking tribesmen dressed like royal mourners in long overcoats reaching to the ankles; a shivering Tajik cook, with bright red hair, unsuitably dressed for Central Asia in crippling pointy brown shoes and natty socks supported by suspenders, but no trousers; the interpreter, a gloomy-looking Afghan in a coma of fatigue, wearing dark glasses, a double-breasted lounge suit and an American hat; and Thesiger himself, a great, long-striding crag of a man, with an outcrop for a nose and bushy eyebrows, forty-five years old and as hard as nails, in an old tweed jacket worn by Eton boys, a pair of thin grey cotton trousers, rope-soled Persian slippers and a cap comforter.

“That cook’s going to die,” said Thesiger; hasn’t got a coat and look at

England’s gone to pot said Thesiger as we lay smoking the interpreter’s King Size cigarettes

his feet. We’re nine thousand if we’re an inch here. How high’s the Chamar Pass?’ We told him 16,000 feet.

“Get a coat and boots, do you hear?” he shouted in the direction of the fire.

After two hours the chickens arrived; they were like elastic, only the rice and gravy were delicious.

Famished, we wrestled with the bones in the darkness. “England’s going to pot,” said Thesiger, as Hugh and I lay smoking the interpreter’s King Size cigarettes, the first for a fortnight. “Look at this shirt, I’ve only had it three years, now it’s splitting.

Same with tailors; Gull and Croke made me a pair of whipcord trousers to go to the Atlas Mountains. Sixteen guineas – wore a hole in them in a fortnight. Bought half a dozen shotguns to give to my headmen, well-known make, twenty guineas apiece, absolute rubbish.”

He began to tell me about his Arabs. “I take off fingers and there is a lot of surgery to be done; they’re frightened of their own doctors because they are not clean.” “Do you do it? Cutting off fingers?” “Hundreds of them,” he said dreamily, for it was very late. “Lord, yes. Why, the other day I took out an eye. I enjoyed that.”

“Let’s turn in,” he said.

The ground was like iron with sharp rocks sticking up out of it.

We started to blow up our air-beds.

“God, you must be a couple of pansies,” said Thesiger.

Eric Newby left the fashion business and became an award-winning travel writer.

A Snake Came to My Parapet A Sana’a Tale how a slithery visitor helped explain YEmen's magical capital. by tim macintosh-smith

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ILLUSTRATIONS: CHRISTIAN MONTENEGRO

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have good reason to be grateful to the ancient South Arabian kingdom of Saba, the biblical Sheba; not least, as will become clear, for the snake up on the parapet of my house here in Sana’a.

There is little solid fact about Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, in the time of Saba. The city lies at a junction of two major trade routes — from the desert to the sea, and along the spine of the mountain range — so it was probably important for a good few centuries BC. By the third century AD it was home to Ghumdan, the skyscraper palace of the Sabaean kings — 10 storeys or more and topped, the old historians said, with a ceiling of alabaster and with eagles and lions of bronze that shrieked and roared when the wind blew.

Beyond that, we don’t know much.

The reason for the gap in historical knowledge is that Sana’a is virtually unexcavated.

Occasional bits and pieces of Sabaeic inscriptions are visible, built into the walls of existing houses. The Great Mosque, founded by order of the Prophet

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Muhammad (PBUH) in about AD 627, contains re-used columns and other masonry that probably came from the next-door site of Ghumdan, and from a cathedral built in the sixth century when the Ethiopians ruled Yemen for a few decades. But the site of the pre-Islamic city itself is an archaeologist’s dream, a virgin tell. And so it will remain, for the ruins are inhabited — covered by the dense urban hive of the later city, itself an architectural masterpiece.

Tower-houses, some themselves going back many hundreds of years, crowd the southern end of the ruinmound where Ghumdan stood.

Going north you pass through the

blacksmiths’ suq, a maze of tiny workshops and flying sparks (they still make things here!). At the north end of the hillock, where the ninth-century palace of the Abbasid

governors stood, you reach the donkey market — and, among others, my house.

This is partly why I’m grateful to the Sabaeans. My five-storey house is not especially tall by Sana’a standards. Some of its grander neighbours go up, in subconscious imitation of the palace of Ghumdan, eight or nine floors. But being on the tail end of the ancient tell, my house has that extra height — and a view, a view that haunts my dreams when I’m away, a view that always brings me back. The manzar, the top-floor ‘viewing-room’ that I added when I moved in, is fine enough inside, with its windows of alabaster and coloured glass and its verseinscription in stately thuluth script – ‘Paris is beneath you in beauty, O Sana’a, and so too are London / And the capitals of the Romans and the Americans… ‘ But it’s when you open the shutters — the sounds of braying donkeys and clanging blacksmiths float up — that the verse makes sense: immediately beyond the low parapet of my miniscule roof-terrace lie the buildings of the suq, punctuated, further away, by sporadic tall houses; there’s a splash of green, a palm and a pepper-tree in a garden; and then the eye is drawn by a wandering line of minarets — exclamation marks in the cityscape, marking the mosques of al-Shahidayn, Aqil, Salah al-Din, al-Bakiriyyah. Over to the right is the dome of the Ottoman mosque in the fort, standing out white against the tawny background like a giant ostrich egg; to the far left, another building obtrudes — the Mövenpick Hotel.

The Mövenpick’s escarpment of mirrored glass is a reminder that we don’t live in a time-warp; that,

in fact, the only constant in the Sana’a scene is its great backdrop, the crouching lion-coloured mass of Jabal Nuqum. The mountain looms over the city from the east, watching the comings and goings of its rulers: Sabaeans, Himyarites, Ethiopians, Persians, Umayyads, Abbasids, then a bewilderment of local dynasties interspersed with a couple of periods of Ottoman rule and the ins and outs of the Zaydi imamate; the declaration of a republic in 1962; what next?

The weather can be as busy as the

The mountain looms over the city, watching its rulers: Sabeans, Persians, Abbasids, Ummayads

history. As we’re so high up – 2,300m, with the peak of Nuqum another 600m above — the lighting of the scene is fickle. In certain seasons the mountain disappears in a greyout of desert dust, blown from the distant Empty Quarter. In spring and summer, thunder-clouds rant and roll around the surrounding plain, crackling with electricity; by the grace of God, rain falls — in deluges, followed by an almost painful clarity in which it seems that every rock on the mountainside is visible. Most days, rain or shine, the late-afternoon sun bronzes the city’s buildings and the bare crags of Nuqum. Then, best of all, comes maghrib-time, when the sun slips behind the jagged rim of mountains to the west, and Sana’a and Nuqum radiate an afterglow, luminous against a fragile sky of 83

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eggshell blue; until, at last, shapes and colours dissolve, and slowly the lights come on behind other windows, like mine, of coloured glass and alabaster.

One shape remains in the immediate darkness outside my window, an even darker, serpentine line, visible against the plastered parapet: a snake! As snakes go, this one is pathetic, a handspan long, perhaps a foot if it could be stretched out; little more than a worm. Besides, as snakes go, this one goes nowhere.

It was

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Sana’a is apparently protected by two talismans in the form of vipers and other snakes

beaten out of an iron rod by one of the clanging blacksmiths down below.

But it has a certain elegance, and it makes up for its shortcomings with a long pedigree.

Writing nearly 1,000 years ago in his History of Sana’a, al-Razi explained that ‘Sana’a is protected by two talismans in the form of vipers and other snakes, and it is rare indeed that these creatures harm anyone. As for death from snakebites, such a thing has never been heard of… One of these talismans is of iron,

and the other of bronze, and they used to be on the main gate of the city. The first, which was in the place known as al-Qasabah, was made in pre-Islamic times. The iron talisman is now on the gate of al-Misra, where the blacksmiths work today; the other is on the gate of al-Kashwari.’

It all sounds highly fanciful. But the odd snake of pre-Islamic vintage does indeed turn up — I have a photograph of a bronze one with a human head, of obscure significance.

Then again, we know that the Sabaeic word S3H R (a suitably sibillant, serpentine word, even if the vowels aren’t known) meant ‘an amulet to protect a building’; in Arabic, the cognate sih r means ‘magic’. Today, some houses in Sana’a have snakes carved on the stones of their facades – undulating, like my iron one, or coiled spring-tight, as if to leap. Older people who know about such things say that they scare actual snakes away. As did al-Razi’s talismans, they work like Beware Of The Dog signs, but inverted: Snakes Beware!

Apart from these pest-controlling serpents of stone and metal, snakes have played a long role in Arab folklore as the guardians of treasure.

As far back as the sixth century AD, a Meccan named Abdallah ibn Jad’an claimed to have come across

the burial cave of some Jurhumites, members of an ancient local tribe.

The cavern also contained an Ali Baba stash of gold and gems, and was guarded by a golden snake with ruby eyes. The belief in snake guardians is still very much alive. When I was about to move into my house on the Sabaean ruin mound, I heard odds and ends of rumours – of a recurring dream experienced by the previous occupant concerning treasure hidden in the house, and of a mysterious snake that had been glimpsed, coiled on a shelf in a first-floor room, ‘not a real snake, you know, but a guardian, from the jinn’. When I did move in I found, in that same first-floor room, a very real small bottle of a type sold in the apothecaries’ suq. It was empty, but it had an Arabic label that said,

‘Oil Of Violets: For Expelling Jinn And Afrits’. And, all over the house, I found equally real holes in the plaster of the walls, where my predecessor had performed her treasure-hunting excavations. (Did she find anything?)

Passing through the blacksmiths’ suq on the day of the move, I spotted the elegant iron talisman and bought it immediately. I was thinking partly of flesh-and-blood snakes: in my old house I’d surprised one in the kitchen one day — after a lively chase, it was dispatched with a heavy coffee-roasting spoon.

Now I judged that prevention, even by ancient and dubious means, would be better than cure. But, I asked the blacksmith, thinking of jinn-snakeguardians, would it see off supernatural as well as everyday snakes?

He smiled. ‘God is the one who 85

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knows… To be honest, there’s not much call for them these days.’

I nailed the talisman above my front door and for several years saw no snakes, natural or supernatural. Mā fi ‘l-h anash illā ra’sih, says a Yemeni proverb: ‘there’s nothing to a snake but its head’ — meaning, Go for the head and you get rid of the problem.

I seemed to have nailed, on the head, the problem of unwelcome slithering visitors. But the story of my talisman of ancient lineage has a tail, a tail to the tale, and the tail has a twist.

A couple of years ago, the iron snake fell off the wall. I nailed it firmly back. It fell off again… my suspicions turned to the numerous small children who live in my alley.

For some time they’d been coming out with questions like, ‘Is it true that you keep snakes in your house, all wriggling around?’ Not wanting to disappoint them, I’d never denied it.

(It has been known. Tennent’s Ceylon mentions a gentleman of Negombo who kept guard-cobras: ‘They glide about the house, a terror to thieves, but never attempting to harm the inmates…‘) As for the iron snake, I took it inside and put it on a shelf to gather dust.

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The very next morning, a visitor came. The fact that he’s the Middle East correspondent of a respectable British daily newspaper is not essential to the story; but the other fact, that I had a witness of his stature, is reassuring. What I was about to see was no hallucination.

We were sitting in my manzar, my top room with the view, when I happened to mention the errant metal snake. ‘Oh!’ my visitor suddenly said.

He was staring out of the window.

‘Look behind you.’

A prickle ran down my spine. I turned — and there, catching the sun as it looped, leisurely, along the parapet, was an elegant, foot-long, metallic-grey snake.

Its tail had hardly slid over the edge when I went and retrieved the talisman and hammered it on to the parapet.

It remains there, on guard, overlooking that magical view. No more snakes have come, so far.

Tim Macintosh-Smith is an award-winning writer who has lived in Sana’a for decades.

THIS IS SEAN FLYNN. HIS FATHER WAS ERROL FLYNN. SEAN WAS DESTINED FOR MOVIE STARDOM, BUT HE CHOSE A DIFFERENT PATH. HE DROVE A MOTORCYCLE INTO COMMUNIST HELD-TERRITORY IN CAMBODIA ON APRIL 6, 1970 AND WAS NEVER SEEN AGAIN. THIS IS A STORY ABOUT YOUTH, WAR, AND DEATH. ABOUT LOVE, FRIENDSHIP, AND GETTING THE PHOTO. THIS IS HIS STORY. BY HIS FRIEND, PERRY DEANE YOUNG.

#MISSING

THE MANY MYSTERIES OF SEAN FLYNN

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eautiful. That was how Michael Herr described Sean Flynn in his brilliant book, Dispatches. Sean was indeed beautiful, no question about it, and outwardly calm no matter how desperate the situation. He had the perfect manners of an old-fashioned gentleman, and yet there always seemed to be inner voices calling to him from some dark place deep within, urging him on to mysterious ventures. How else do you explain his obsession with weapons. His fascination with mortal combat in Vietnam. And, of course, his final journey down a road in Cambodia he knew he might never return from.

Sean’s actor father, Errol, had the grace to say, “he looks like me, but better.” And Errol himself was no slouch when it came to looks. For nearly 30 years he was the ultimate swashbuckling hero to moviegoers the world over. Errol was Ivanhoe and Don Juan and Jeb Stuart and

Captain Blood and General Custer and Gentleman Jim Corbett. As film executive Jack Warner said of him: “He was all the heroes in one magnificent sexy, animal package.” His escapades off camera only added to that image.

Errol was a fantasy figure to millions of people, but he was the very real father of my friend, Sean. It didn’t help that his son grew up in the precise physical image of his father.

Sean’s mother, the French-born actress, Lili Damita, had been the real star when she met the poor Australian actor on a boat to America in 1935.

Lili had starred in several major silent movies, but, like so many others, she was unable to make the transition to talkies. After marrying Errol, she never made another movie.

After Sean was born in 1941, Errol would write in his memoir, My

Wicked Wicked Ways, Lili’s real career became suing him for all he was worth. She took Sean to live in Palm Beach, Florida, as far away from Errol and Hollywood as she could get.

One of his grade school teachers remembers Lili running so hard in the parent-son races she fell on her face.

“I was mother, father, everything to him,” she told me. “I did it all myself.”

She felt a young boy should know all about guns so she took him to have shooting lessons from a colourful character with a range outside town.

It was the beginning of Sean’s lifelong fascination with weapons.

Sean was a senior at the Lawrenceville School in October of 1959 when Errol died in Canada, at the age of 50 and in the company of his teenage girlfriend, Beverly Aadland. When young Sean attended his father’s funeral at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in

As an actor, Sean was as unconvincing as his father had been a true natural

Glendale, CA, he caught the eye of all the old pros in Hollywood.

Hy Seeger, George Hamilton’s agent, said, “He was maybe the most beautiful boy I had ever seen.” George had also grown up in Palm Beach and he and Sean had been friends since they met before a judge on separate speeding charges. When the 20-yearold George was filming Where the

SEAN FLYNN AND TIM PAGE WORKING AS PHOTOGRAPHERS IN VIETNAM

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Boys Are in Fort Lauderdale in 1959, he got a walk-on part for his friend Sean, who was 18.

Sean’s mother was ferocious in her opposition to a film career for her only child. It would take a year before she relented and allowed him to sign with Seeger as his agent.

AMERICAN COMBAT HELICOPTERS ON A SEARCH AND DESTROY MISSION IN SOUTH VIETNAM IN 1967

By that time, Sean was a freshman at Duke University. He had been at Duke only about three months when he got the offer from director Harry Joe Brown to star in The Son Of Captain Blood, a sequel to his father’s first big film, which Brown had also directed.

As an actor, Sean was every bit as stiff as his father had been natural and convincing in his cutthroat roles.

One reviewer said Sean, “seems like a nice boy, which is going to be his handicap for some time to come.”

When Sean set off to film another B movie in Spain in 1961, he left Hollywood for good, returning only

for one or two brief visits. Only one of his movies was ever seriously reviewed. His mother gave him her mother’s apartment in Paris that became his base camp for various hunting trips to Africa.

When he set off for Vietnam in January of 1966, he was pursuing “the sole great adventure,” and one his father had never experienced. Errol was ridiculed for playing heroes in the movies but was ineligible for service in the Second World War. The Hearst papers sent him to cover the Spanish Civil War, but he turned tail and ran at the first signs of danger.

Sean arrived in Saigon carrying two suitcases, a suit, an attaché case, a camera and a tennis racket. A letter from Paris-Match got him his accreditation. Having never worked as a journalist or photographer, he set off to cover the war.

He had no deadlines, so he was able to stay out with the troops as long as he wanted. The Green Berets adopted him as one of their own. A Green Beret officer told me: “The guys fell in love with him; they thought he was the greatest thing going. They identified with him because he was willing to take his share of the 91

SEAN FLYNN

chances.” No other correspondent had such access to missions. And Sean came out with pictures such as the ones of prisoners being tortured, which nobody had gotten before.

The stories under Sean’s byline were not the shallow observations of a movie swashbuckler, they were sensitive stories about the “real stupidity of war.”

In one, Sean described an American captain crying as he watched a Vietnamese child dying of shrapnel wounds. After he moved into moving film, Sean began stockpiling hours and hours of film with the ambition of producing the ultimate documentary on war.

After the “Five O’clock Follies” — the daily American press briefing — one day in Saigon, Sean encountered Tim Page. They became instant friends, the war’s odd couple. On the surface, the two seemed polar opposites and yet they would become the kind of bosom buddies that can only happen in the midst of war. Tim was every bit as gregarious as Sean was careful, contained, polite. Invited to an embassy party, the two showed up in Viet Cong style black pajamas.

Timothy John Page was born May 25, 1944 in a suburb of London. He was 21 years old when he managed to get the only pictures of a coup in Laos that led to a staff job with UPI. It didn’t take long for Tim to move on up to Life; that’s where the money was.

Tim was first wounded by “three pieces of shrapnel up the bum” in September of 1965. During the Buddhist riots in Danang in July of 1966, Tim was hit in the hand and face, with blood spurting all over him. Sean commandeered a Marine jeep, strapped Tim on the front on an 92

old wooden door and sped off to the military hospital. After this, Tim was taking no-risk assignments like a visit to the Coast Guard cutter, Point Welcome. Incredibly, the ship was bombed and strafed by American F-4 fighter jets on nine different passes.

Two Coast Guardsmen were killed.

Tim counted 800 pieces of shrapnel in his body and carefully saved his hospital bills and mailed them to the Secretary of the Air Force.

If Sean had a charmed reputation as one of the lucky ones everybody wanted to be with, Tim was the opposite. One colleague said he was “a walking magnet for shrapnel.” A collection was taken up to get him out of the country. He left with Sean to film the worst, and last, of his bad movies, this one called Cinq Gars Pour Singapore or Five Guys For Singapore. Tim went off to America where he proudly got himself arrested (for drugs) on stage with The Doors.

When the Singapore film had its premiere in Paris, Tim and Sean were together again, arriving in Tim’s taxi in jeans and T-shirts. One night at the Ritz in London, George Hamilton got a call from hotel security that two suspicious guys in black pajamas wanted to see him. “That’s no Viet Cong,” said George. “That’s Errol Flynn’s son.”

George had a reputation for going out with President Johnson’s daughter while dodging the draft. Sean said he ought to see the war for himself, “things are more clear-cut there.”

That made no sense to George and he urged Sean to come back and resume his acting career. Sean had taken fencing lessons and done all the superficial things, but he had never

taken acting lessons “and he had the depth to be a good actor.”

George never saw his friend again.

The next thing he heard, Sean was in the Six Day War in Israel and then he was back in Vietnam after the Tet Offensive began in January of 1968. I had arrived in Saigon the night before Tet and had made the rounds of all the New Year’s Eve parties. At 3am, my office called and said, “Come to work if you can get across the street.”

I covered the fighting in Saigon, then flew to Danang where I was in and out of the siege at Khe Sanh and the battle for Hue. To me, it was all so overwhelming it never seemed quite real to me. I was watching a movie and so never felt the very real dangers. And, one afternoon at the Danang Press Center, Sean Flynn walked onto the set of my movie.

THE LAST PHOTO OF SEAN AND DANA

Sean turned up in Saigon with a suitcase, a suit, a camera and a tennis racquet

SEAN FLYNN

SEAN AND HIS FATHER ERROL ON A FISHING TRIP NEAR LAS VEGAS IN 1951

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Understated does not begin to describe him. Soft-spoken, almost shy, he seemed an utter contradiction to the legend that preceded him. He quietly asked if I wanted to walk down along the riverfront with him.

It is the quiet times like this that I remember; hanging out at the little cottage of our soul mates, Dana and Louise Stone, lazy afternoons at the Pink House on China Beach.

Off course, Tim was not far behind. He showed up one night at the Saigon airport – with all his camera equipment, but with no visa, no money and no accreditation. A group of us went out to help him through customs.

Tim had arrived just before “mini-Tet” and with money from a Life magazine cover, he was staging lavish banquets for his friends in no time. He soon recruited me to join him in renting the other half of a huge apartment on Tu Do Street where Sean and UPI photographer Nik Wheeler lived.

It was an open clubhouse. John Steinbeck IV, son of the author, was soon a regular. John explained that he and Sean were instant friends “because we both had a name that was only partly our own.”

For my own goodbye to Vietnam, the whole group took off for a weekend jaunt in December 1968. I then set off on my own tour of the Orient, from Hong Kong to Singapore to Bali and then back up the Malay peninsula to the Thai capital, Bangkok.

Sean and I were in Vientiane, Laos, when he received a telegram from Saigon: “VOTRE AMI EST GRAVEMENT BLESSE ET PEUT-ETRE MOURIR.” [Your friend is gravely wounded and perhaps to die.] After a wild night out, we flew back to Saigon to see Tim.

I could not imagine a more hideous end to our war adventure as we slowly made our way down the long rows of mutilated young soldiers now laid out like sides of beef, their lives ruined at such a young age. Tim was not expected to live and if he did, he might never walk again. Tim, of course, is a survivor. He would go on to a distinguished career as a photographer and author of books.

Sean, meanwhile, wrote out his own will and then took off to Indonesia, where he fell in love with a high

Sean and Dana drove around a Communist roadblock and into enemy territory

school girl named Lacsmi. The next we heard, Sean was in jail. A taxi driver had assumed his girlfriend was a prostitute and arranged a paid date for her. Sean went after the driver, his john and his Mercedes, with a baseball bat. We never heard how Sean got out of that one, but he was soon back in Saigon with tales of his idyllic life in Bali. He was going to live out his life on that peaceful isle.

Dana and Louise were now living in the old apartment. They had left the war for good but, like Sean, Dana was always drawn back to it. He became a CBS cameraman and was sent into Cambodia just days before the American incursion.

Sean couldn’t stand the idea of missing out on this new phase of the war and he soon joined Dana at the Hotel Royale in Phnom Penh.

Dana and Sean rented two bright red brand new Suzuki motorcycles. The

next morning the two set for the town of Chi Pou near the Vietnamese border.

A government-led tour for other correspondents caught up with Sean and Dana, some would remember overhearing them. The two sat arguing at a teashop. Dana talked about the danger of what Sean wanted to do; Sean said of course it was dangerous “but that’s what makes it a good story.”

Sean tossed Dana’s keys into a puddle and set off alone. Dana quipped, “Sean’s trying to scoop me” and rushed after him. The other correspondents watched in amazement as the two drove around a Communist roadblock and headed into enemy territory.

By that time, I had a newspaper job in New York. Although Herr had described Vietnam as “the happy childhood none of us ever had,” he had also written of the aftermath when “it seems the dead have only been spared a lot of pain.”

When a friend at UPI called up to tell me they’d been captured, I blurted out: “I wish to hell I were with them.”

You could not grieve for them as you would for others lost in the war. They were there because they wanted to be there; and they were fully aware of the dangers that took their lives.

Their images will live on in that last photograph of them alive and young and setting off on yet another adventure. There’s Sean on his motorcycle, dressed in the latest shades from Paris, a floppy jungle hat, T-shirt, cut-off shorts and flip flops as he set off to die.

Perry Deane Young is the author of Two of the Missing, Remembering Sean Flynn and Dana Stone

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North korea's capital, pyongyang, is one of the most secretive places on earth. Charlie crane photographs a city trapped in time

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THE SURREAL WORLD

C;7H? I>EEJ?D= H7D=; This is the shooting range where Kim Jong Su – who won a silver medal in the 2004 Olympics in Athens – perfected her ability. You can use pistols here – low calibre sports weapons, not the guns used by the army. Ho Sung Ae is pictured. She has been working at the shooting range for six years. She served in the Korean People’s Army for three years and was selected for her good shooting skills. She often gets 30 marks with three shots, the maximum possible. She is working towards becoming a shooting teacher but is now 28 and so will soon be married.

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CEH7D8ED= C?::B; I9>EEB DE$ ' This is the playground of Moranbang Middle School. The main building has six floors and all subjects are taught here, including English, which everyone must study. School starts at 8am and ends at 1pm. After-school activities take place in the afternoon. Children go to school from age six to sixteen, and then usually to university or to the army. On top of the block of flats is the slogan ‘Independence, Peace and Friendship’, which is lit up at night.

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=H7D: F;EFB;ÉI IJK:O >EKI; This is one of the reading rooms in the Grand People’s Study House and the guide is Mrs He. The Great Leader Kim Il Sung designed the desks for the people so that they are tilted, to aid the reader. The Study House has more than 600 rooms for study. There are lecture rooms, recording rooms and consultation rooms where people can speak with experts on certain subjects. The building can contain more than 12,000 people.

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C?D O; IEK L ; D? H I> EF This is An Gyeung Ae, 25, who is a sales girl at the shop, which is an outlet for musical instruments, sculptures, ďŹ ne art and ginseng. She has worked there for three years. The ginseng tea is very popular with tourists from South Korea, while Western tourists prefer brass chopsticks and bowls and small cloth Korean dolls.

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C?::B; I9>EEB IJK:;DJ This is Kim Chun Hyo, who is on a break from classes. He is wearing the standard school uniform with the school badge. Each badge has the name of the school written on it under the Juche ame. When he is older he would like to play basketball or be a footballer. He is trying to get good grades to get into the Sports College.

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FK>KD= C;JHE IJ7J?ED Our metro station is the deepest in the world at more than 100 metres below ground. We have two lines that run all across the city and you just pay for one ticket to go anywhere. As you can see, we don’t have any litter or damage in the metro. The citizens are very proud of the metro and take good care of it. The mural at the end is of our Great Leader Comrade Kim Il Sung among the workers.

Charlie Crane teamed up with Nick Bonner of Koryo Tours in 2007 to produce the book, Welcome to Pyongyang, published by Chris Boot.

The captions are from the guide who showed Charlie around the city. www.charliecrane.com www.koryogroup.com

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ILLUSTRATIONS: JOHN WOO

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STYLE • MAPPED BOBBA FETT AND CHEWIE SHOW US HOW TO SPACE TRAVEL IN THE FINEST THREADS

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FEATURE

THE VALLEY OF KINGS SET AT THE FOOT OF A CANYON IN Australia’s Blue Mountains World Heritage area, the Wolgan Valley Resort & Spa is showing the world that the concept of ‘luxury with a conscience’ does exist.

The Emirates-run resort is situated on the 4,000 acre Wolgan Valley Conservation Reserve, but despite its 40 free-standing luxury suites it covers a mere two per cent of the land, allowing 98 per cent to be explored.

“Being situated in the spectacular Wolgan Valley, we set out to take the idea of luxury holidays in Australia to a new level,” says Joost Heymeijer, the resort’s General Manager. “We wanted to offer people a luxurious getaway based on the idea of ‘luxury with a conscience’ – a place that offers firstclass service but not at the cost of its conservation credentials.”

EMIRATES S DAILY LAUNCHE O FLIGHTS T M O R DUBLIN F

JANUARY 2012

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And credentials it has aplenty — the resort was the first in the world to gain a carboNZero accreditation within just three months of opening — ensuring not only that it is carbon-neutral but also that it actively protects its surrounding habitat. For the second year in a row, the resort has maintained its carbon neutral status following a carboNZero recertification.

Based on principles of its sister hotel, the Al Maha Desert Resort & Spa, in Dubai, the Wolgan Valley resort uses its natural location to maximise its luxury appeal to guests.

“You can get your own luxury country suite with a private pool, hundreds of acres of wilderness and some of the best views in the country,” says Heymeijer.

“People like to come here to get away from the city.” says Heymeijer.

“Wolgan is about the things you don’t have to do, but there is plenty on offer should guests want to get about and enjoy the reserve — from horse riding to wildlife safaris, to learning about Australia’s colonial history by exploring their 1832 heritage homestead and kitchen gardens.

Heymeijer says that Emirates run the resort very much as ‘custodians’ of the land. “We are serious about our commitment to the land and its aboriginal heritage, We are not the original owners of the land, which is why we take care of it.”

We take care of the land the resort is on

Grand hospitality

Executive Room

Grand SPA

Outdoor Pool

Panorama Restaurant

Emirates Grand Hotel is an elegant four-star property located on Sheikh Zayed Road in the heart of Dubai, with a panoramic view of Dubai and Burj Khalifa, the tallest tower in the world. Just 100 metres from Dubai International Finance Centre (DIFC) and the metro station, it’s within easy walking distance from the Dubai International Convention Centre and the World Trade Center. Being 15 minutes away from Dubai International Airport, the property is at the centre of Dubai’s business district.

100

15

150

$150 starting rate. Terms and conditions apply.

Please contact our reservation of ce Tel: 04-3230000 or email us at: reservations@emiratesgrandhotel.com

043230000 reservations@emiratesgrandhotel .com

P.O. Box 116957, Dubai, United Arab Emirates Tel: +971 4 323 0000 | Fax: +971 4 323 0003 | reservations@emiratesgrandhotel.com | www.emiratesgrandhotel.com

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EMI RATES NEWS

15%

EN VIRONMENT

ENVIRONMENTAL REPORT AS THE EMIRATES GROUP PUBLISHES its environmental report, it is clear that being green is a key priorty.

Covering areas such as fuel efficiency to the world’s first paperless cargo flight, the results from the Emirates Group Environmental Report 2010-2011 demonstrates just how widespread its environmental commitment is.

The audited report covered environmental performance across a range of activities, including airline operations, dnata’s cargo and ground handling business and commercial activities

AGE THE AVER IN NOISE SE EA R EC D T IN EACH FOOTPRIN ERATION NEW GEN CRAFT IR A OF AERO W.ENVIRO. SOURCE: WW

such as engineering and catering.

One of the most impressive results was the airline’s carbon dioxide emissions efficiency rate – 26 per cent better than the global average.

However, environmental issues are not limited purely to fuel efficiency. In March 2011, Emirates’ SkyCargo division successfully oversaw the world’s first 100 per cent paperless cargo flight. The e-flight saw a shipment of 103,884 tonnes of cut flowers flown from Nairobi to Amsterdam, with the shipment details being sent electronically.

GREENWEB Here is a list of some of the most influential and active tweeters who are going green online.

MUST FOLLOW: @ECOPOLITOLOGIST Tim Hurst is a writer and editor at Green Options and Ecopolitology. His tweets cover a broad spectrum of green subjects. @NATURE_ORG The official site of a leading conservation organisation: Nature Conservancy. @GRIST Andrew Winston is an environmental strategist and author of

Green Recovery and co-author of Green to Gold.

GREEN LIFESTYLE TIPS: @GREENSTERTRIBE Louis Fruchier and the tribe, keeping you afloat with the inside track on modern eco-culture.

THE NUMBER OF AEROSPACE COMPANIES FORMING THE NEW INTERNATIONAL

11 12

AEROSPACE ENVIRONMENTAL GROUP (IAEG)

DUNG BEETLE

GREEN GENIE

BONN CHANCE

‘Bio-Bug’, a car that

This helpful little

A new global effort

of the world’s deforested

runs on human waste,

smartphone app

to restore 150 million

lands are available

has been developed

suggests more than

hectares of deforested

for restoration. The

by a team of British

100 green projects to

and degraded land by

programme, headed by

engineers. The VW

tackle, such as bringing 2020 has been launched.

Beetle is powered by

your own shopping

The Bonn Challenge

of Sweden, Goran Persson,

a biofuel derived from

bags to ways to get

builds on a global

claims that in addition to

methane gas and is

paid for reducing

assessment that over two

helping the environment,

the first of its kind.

your emissions.

billion hectares

it will also help create jobs.

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the former Prime Minister

SOURCE: WWW.ENVIRO.AERO

YEARS IT TOOK FOR THE POPULATION TO GROW FROM SIX TO SEVEN BILLION

SOURCE: WWW.ENVIRO.AERO

EMI RATES NEWS

COMFORT

BEFORE YOU R JOU R N EY CONSULT YOUR DOCTOR BEFORE TRAVELLING IF YOU HAVE ANY MEDICAL CONCERNS ABOUT MAKING A LONG JOURNEY, OR IF YOU SUFFER FROM A RESPIRATORY OR

IN THE AIR

CARDIOVASCULAR CONDITION. PLAN FOR THE DESTINATION – WILL

TO HELP YOU ARRIVE AT YOUR destination feeling relaxed and refreshed, Emirates has developed this collection of helpful travel tips.

Regardless of whether you need to

rejuvenate for your holiday or be effective at achieving your goals on a business trip, these simple tips will help you to enjoy your journey and time on board with Emirates today.

YOU NEED ANY VACCINATIONS OR SPECIAL MEDICATIONS? GET A GOOD NIGHT’S REST BEFORE THE FLIGHT. EAT LIGHTLY AND SENSIBLY.

AT TH E AI R PORT

SMART TRAVELLER

ALLOW YOURSELF PLENTY OF TIME FOR CHECK-IN.

DRINK PLENTY OF WATER

TRAVEL LIGHTLY

AVOID CARRYING HEAVY BAGS THROUGH THE AIRPORT AND ONTO THE FLIGHT AS THIS CAN PLACE THE BODY UNDER CONSIDERABLE STRESS. ONCE THROUGH TO DEPARTURES TRY AND RELAX AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE.

REHYDRATE WITH WATER OR JUICES FREQUENTLY.

CARRY ONLY THE ESSENTIAL ITEMS THAT

DRINK TEA AND COFFEE IN MODERATION.

YOU WILL NEED DURING YOUR FLIGHT.

MAKE YOURSELF COMFORTABLE

DU R ING THE FLIGHT CHEWING AND SWALLOWING WILL HELP EQUALISE YOUR EAR PRESSURE

KEEP MOVING

DURING ASCENT AND DESCENT. BABIES AND YOUNG PASSENGERS MAY SUFFER MORE ACUTELY WITH POPPING EARS, THEREFORE CONSIDER PROVIDING A DUMMY.

LOOSEN CLOTHING, REMOVE JACKET AND

EXERCISE YOUR LOWER LEGS AND CALF

GET AS COMFORTABLE AS

AVOID ANYTHING PRESSING AGAINST YOUR BODY.

MUSCLES. THIS ENCOURAGES BLOOD FLOW.

POSSIBLE WHEN RESTING AND TURN FREQUENTLY.

WEAR GLASSES

USE SKIN MOISTURISER

AVOID SLEEPING FOR LONG PERIODS IN THE SAME POSITION.

W H EN YOU ARR IV E TRY SOME LIGHT EXERCISE OR READ IF YOU CAN’T SLEEP AFTER ARRIVAL.

CABIN AIR IS DRIER THAN NORMAL THEREFORE

APPLY A GOOD QUALITY MOISTURISER TO

SWAP YOUR CONTACT LENSES FOR GLASSES.

ENSURE YOUR SKIN DOESN’T DRY OUT.

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EMI RATES NEWS

CABIN L BE CREW WIL LP HE HAPPY TO D E IF YOU NE

CUSTOMS & VISAS

E C N A T S I S S A PLETING COM THE FORMS

TO US CUSTOMS & IMMIGRATION FORMS WHETHER YOU’RE TRAVELLING TO, OR THROUGH, THE UNITED States today, this simple guide to completing the US customs and immigration forms will help to ensure that your journey

is as hassle free as possible. The Cabin Crew will offer you two forms when you are nearing your destination. We provide guidelines below, so you can correctly complete the forms.

CUSTOMS DECLAR ATION FORM

IMMIGR ATION FORM

All passengers arriving into the US need to complete a CUSTOMS DECLARATION FORM. If you are travelling as a family this should be completed by one member only. The form must be completed in English, in capital letters, and must be signed where indicated.

The IMMIGRATION FORM I-94 (Arrival / Departure Record) should be completed if you are a non-US citizen in possession of a valid US visa and your final destination is the US or if you are in transit to a country outside the US. A separate form must be completed for each person, including children travelling on their parents’ passport. The form includes a Departure Record which must be kept safe and given to your airline when you leave the US. If you hold a US or Canadian passport, US Alien Resident Visa (Green Card), US Immigrant Visa or a valid ESTA (right), you are not required to complete an immigration form.

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ELECTRONIC SYSTEM FOR

WILL EXPIRE ALONG WITH

TRAVEL AUTHORISATION (ESTA)

YOUR PASSPORT.

IF YOU ARE AN INTERNATIONAL

APPLY ONLINE AT WWW.CBP.GOV/ESTA

TRAVELLER WISHING TO ENTER THE UNITED STATES UNDER THE

NATIONALITIES ELIGIBLE

VISA WAIVER PROGRAMME,

FOR THE VISA WAIVER *:

YOU MUST APPLY FOR

ANDORRA, AUSTRALIA,

ELECTRONIC AUTHORISATION

AUSTRIA, BELGIUM, BRUNEI,

(ESTA) UP TO 72 HOURS PRIOR

CZECH REPUBLIC, DENMARK,

TO YOUR DEPARTURE.

ESTONIA, FINLAND, FRANCE, GERMANY, HUNGARY, ICELAND,

ESTA FACTS:

IRELAND, ITALY, JAPAN, LATVIA,

CHILDREN AND

LIECHTENSTEIN, LITHUANIA,

INFANTS REQUIRE AN

LUXEMBURG, MALTA, MONACO,

INDIVIDUAL ESTA.

THE NETHERLANDS, NEW

THE ONLINE ESTA SYSTEM

ZEALAND, NORWAY, PORTUGAL,

WILL INFORM YOU WHETHER

SAN MARINO, SINGAPORE,

YOUR APPLICATION HAS BEEN

SLOVAKIA, SLOVENIA, SOUTH

AUTHORISED, NOT AUTHORISED

KOREA, SPAIN, SWEDEN,

OR IF AUTHORISATION

SWITZERLAND AND THE

IS PENDING.

UNITED KINGDOM**.

A SUCCESSFUL ESTA

*

APPLICATION IS VALID

** ONLY BRITISH CITIZENS QUALIFY UNDER THE VISA WAIVER PROGRAMME.

FOR TWO YEARS, HOWEVER

AD

80 mm wide x 224 mm high

SUBJECT TO CHANGE

THIS MAY BE REVOKED OR

THE NUMBER OF LANGUAGES SPOKEN BY EMIRATES CABIN CREW:

50 23

THE NUMBER OF SPECIAL MEALS THAT CAN BE ORDERED TO MEET RELIGIOUS AND MEDICAL DIETARY NEEDS:

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EMI RATES NEWS

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ROUTE MA P

ROUTE MA P

EMIRATES NEWS

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EMI RATES NEWS

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ROUTE MA P

ROUTE MA P

EMIRATES NEWS

AD 123

THE FLOENETTAINS

C OUR FLEET ADE 162 PLANESS. SMENGER PA UP OF 153 D9 PLANES AN ANES CARGO PL

For more information: www.emirates.com/ourf leet 125

EMIRATES EMI RATES NEWS NEWS

FLEET FLEETGUI GU DE I DE

Boeing 777-300ER Number of Aircraft: 60 Capacity: 354-442 Range: 14,594km Length: 73.9m Wingspan: 64.8m

Boeing 777-300 Number of Aircraft: 12 Capacity: 364 Range: 11,029km Length: 73.9m Wingspan: 60.9m

Boeing 777-200LR Number of Aircraft: 10 Capacity: 266 Range: 17,446km Length: 63.7m Wingspan: 64.8m

Boeing 777-200 Number of Aircraft: 9 Capacity: 274-346 Range: 9,649km Length: 63.7m Wingspan: 60.9m

Boeing 777F Number of Aircraft: 3 Range 9,260km Length: 63.7m Wingspan: 64.8m 126

FLEET GUI DE

EMIRATES NEWS

Airbus A380-800 Number of Aircraft: 17 Capacity: 489-517 Range: 15,000km Length: 72.7m Wingspan: 79.8m

Airbus A340-500 Number of Aircraft: 10 Capacity: 258 Range: 16,050km Length: 67.9m Wingspan: 63.4m

Airbus A340-300 Number of Aircraft: 8 Capacity: 267 Range: 13,350km Length: 63.6m Wingspan: 60.3m

Airbus A330-200 Number of Aircraft: 27 Capacity: 237-278 Range: 12,200km Length: 58.8m Wingspan: 60.3m

Boeing 747-400F/747-ERF Number of Aircraft: 4/2 Range 8,232km/9,204km Length: 70.6m Wingspan: 64.4m

AI RCRAFT N UMBERS AS OF 3 1/10 /2011

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NEXT MONTH...

W

e head to Tokyo for our Japan issue. We will be bringing you the best of the country’s creative talents in a magazine produced from our very own Open Skies ‘suite’ in the heart of Tokyo. We will also be wandering the streets armed with cameras, smartphones and laptops; if you see us, say hi. We will delve into Tokyo’s underworld, courtesy of Jake Adelstein, whose book, Tokyo Vice, is a searing portrayal of a crime reporter’s beat.

We will also showcase some amazing photos of the country, from the snow monkeys of Nagano to the temples of Kansai. Japan has produced countless great writers and we will showcase one wonderful short story from a master of the trade. An issue with a difference, and a celebration of all things Japanese.

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