(The following was written after trips to Mecca in 2004 and 2005 as Reuters correspondent sent to cover hajj) One of the jewels in the crown of the Saudi-Wahhabi state is its control of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. When Abdulaziz […]
My first day in Oxford, I arrived at 2 in the afternoon into Heathrow from Dubai, and got straight onto the express train to Paddington then in 20 minutes on the train to Oxford via a neighbouring platform. Pretty straightforward. But when […]
Hong Kong is impressive in so many ways. Urban living is taken up an extra notch and the result seems so advanced compared to ‘Old Europe’, as former US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once put it – overhead walkways and escalators that […]
The number of people who said don’t go to Iran was really astounding, even more so now that I’ve been there and back. The country is a pleasant surprise in many respects. It is very clean, very green, very organised. People are […]
One of the first things that hit me when I arrived in India for the time – Mumbai in 2005 – was how similar to Egypt it was, or at least this one little part of it seemed so. Mumbai, a city […]