An apology, an update and some exciting news....

Firstly let me start with an apology. Whilst I have been regularly updating my website with my travel progress (and also revamping the design and layout – you can see it at: www.readingtheworld.co.uk – let me know what you think!), I have let my blog get a bit out of date.

In fact, I got a shock when I realised my last post was back in April 2012 – I hope my followers are still out there!!

Rest assured I am still forging on with my literary expedition around the world – and loving every minute of it.

Since my last post (Libya), I have been making my way around the West of Africa, taking in Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Gibraltar, Western Sahara, Mauritania, Cape Verde, Gambia, Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Cote D’Ivoire, Mali, Niger, Benin, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Togo and am currently in Nigeria (courtesy of the wonderful novel ‘Purple Hibiscus’ by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

So you can see I have not been slacking in my travels – I just need to catch up with myself with all of these reviews for this blog!!

There is also another, exciting, reason for the lag in updating these reviews; as I have been working on volume one of "Reading the World: A Global Journey Through Literature.” This book will be published around early 2014, and details my experiences in preparing for and setting out on my travels through literature... Volume 1 will cover my journey from 2009 when I started out, through to the end of 2010. More volumes will follow...

I will update this blog with more details on this soon (as well as some of the reviews of the visits listed above), and you can also check for updates on my new FaceBook page: http://tinyurl.com/mgs4m7d

Back to Nigeria now, see you soon!

Outside Looking In: Letters From Togo

Susan Blake's essays — her “Letters from Togo” — are based on the letters she wrote to her friends from Lomé, the West African capital where she spent a Fulbright year teaching American literature from 1983 to 1984, with return trips in 1990 and 1991. As Blake begins the process of making sense out of a vibrant, seeming anarchy, we are pulled along with her into the heart of Togo—a tiny dry strip of a country sandwiched between Ghana and Benin.

In the course of her letters Blake introduces us to Mahouna, her housekeeper, who runs a cold drink business from his refrigerator in a country where electricity is unreliable; to American Lee Ann and her Togolese family, who works at the American school to earn the fees for a private education for her children; and to the suave René, with whom a relationship briefly flourishes and who teeters on the edge of the Togolese and expatriate worlds.

Since Lomé is both an overgrown village and a cosmopolitan city, Blake's often humorous experiences range from buying a car to attending a traditional tom-tom funeral, from visiting people who hunt with bows and arrows to enduring faculty meetings, from negotiating the politics of buying produce to lecturing on Afro-American literature at the English Club. Together, her letters trace the pattern of adjusting to a foreign environment and probe the connections between Africa and this curious, energetic American. Not "out of Africa" but within it, they take advantage of time and perspective to penetrate the universal experience of being a stranger in a strange land...

All in all an engaging memoir of an engaging country, but one which – as Blake herself acknowledges – is written very much from an outsiders perspective.

From Togo I leapfrog neighbouring Benin (where I have already visited) and head to Nigeria.

Passenger trains into Nigeria being virtually non-existent I am forced to part with the best part of £350 for a flight ticket. I make my way to the nearby Lomé-Tokoin airport and catch a flight on Togolese airline Asky, leaving at 13.30 and arriving an hour later in Lagos’ Murtala Muhammad airport at 15.30 (allowing for the time difference).

There is a rather inconvenient fifteen hour stopover (compared to just two hours flight time in total between destinations!) so I spend a night in a nearby hotel, the Deskyline Hotel. It is just a couple of minutes around the corner from the airport, and there is a restaurant where I am able to grab a beer and a meal of local fare. However, my room (which sets me back $100) is basic to say the least, still it is a bed for the night...

The next morning I catch the onward Arik Air International flight at 7.20. Again, this flight lasts just one hour before I am landing at my next destination – Enugu in Nigeria and the novel "Purple Hisbiscus" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Murder in Ghana: An Ideal Marriage of Suspense and Location with the ‘Wife of the Gods’

Kwei Quartey's compelling debut mystery, 'Wife of the Gods', introduces Ghanian Detective Inspector Darko Dawson investigating the murder of a medical student in a village some distance from his home (and jurisdiction) in the country's capital of Accra.

The crime is unusual and the government authorities have requested help from the capital, whose forensic knowledge far exceeds that of the local police force. The victim has no obvious injuries and is found posed as if sleeping in the woods. Dawson, however, has mixed feelings about accepting the assignment and returning to the village of Ketanu. He has been there only once, over 25 years ago, to visit his aunt and uncle. On a later visit, when just his mother went, she disappeared on returning home. Whether she is alive or dead, no one knows. Still, the case interests him and he's certain that the young man, who has been arrested for the crime, is innocent. He's equally certain that another popular sentiment in the village is also not true, that a purported witch living nearby struck her down using herbal magic.

'Wife of the Gods' is written with a quiet elegance, often lyrical in its narrative. Sound actually plays an important part of the story, Dawson having a particular affinity for distinguishing subtle variations in speech patterns. Consider this passage from early in the book:

Darko felt the silken quality and the musical lilt of Auntie's voice. He had always had a peculiarly heightened sensitivity to speech. Not only did he hear it but he often perceived it, as though physically touching it. He had on occasion told [his brother] Cairo or Mama that he could feel "bumps" in a person's voice, or that it was prickly or wet. They were mystified by this, but Darko could not explain it any better than he could describe the process of sight or smell.

The mystery itself is rather intricate, made so in part by the customs and beliefs of the villagers. The author incorporates these cultural references into the story in a seamless, natural manner; they are a part of Dawson's investigation without necessarily being the cause of it. Furthermore, their very being is not a hinderance and Dawson's knowledge of them may help him find the solution to the young woman's murder.

There are a number of familiar elements to the story including the wise mentor to Dawson. At one point he says to Darko, "You remember what I told you about solving mysteries?", to which Dawson replies, "That it's a matter of making a few of the connections and the rest will fall in place." And that is really what 'Wife of the Gods' is all about.

An outstanding effort overall to be sure, but there are a couple of minor points that may resonate with readers. Darko Dawson is given to occasional, violent outbursts which seem at odds to the intellectual character that he seems most comfortable being. These scenes don't really add much depth or interest to his character, and seem discordant in a somewhat disturbing way. And the investigation seems to conveniently ignore a person's cell phone, and not the throwaway kind, that is the preferred way of communicating within the country — not surprising given the lack of infrastructure for wired service. Yet no one thinks to check cell phone records to determine where people (read suspects) might have been at any given time. Finally, the title, which rates a special author note, is not terribly relevant to the crime or its solution, and serves more as an introduction to a tangential subplot. These comments, however, are at most quibbles for this truly remarkable mystery that unfolds in a most unusual setting.

Review Copyright © 2009 — Hidden Staircase Mystery Books

Before setting out on my journey to neighbouring Togo, i make a relatively painless trip to the Togolese embassy in Accra for my entry visa (10,000CFA for a single entry 30 day visa).

Actually getting to my next destination is also fairly straight forward as there are bush taxis everywhere in Accra. These are basically four door cars, with four people in the back, and two sharing the front.

These are mainly reconstituted European cars with the seats stripped out and benches added in. I select a battered Peogeut 505 which still retains its back seats, and negotiate with the driver to have the taxi to myself for a reasonable $20 (it is usually $5 per person).

From Accra we head straight to Lomé, capital of Togo, on the pleasantly paved and un-bumpy Trans African Coastal Highway that crosses Togo, connecting it to Benin and Nigeria to the east, and Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire to the west.

Thus I arrive fairly un-dishevelled for my stopover courtesy of ‘Letters From Togo’ by Susan Blake...

Growing up in the ‘Country of Men’: Libya under Colonel Gadaffi

"In the Country of Men" is a novel set in Tripoli during the rule of Colonel Gadaffi. It is not however, primarily a political novel; it's about the relationships in one family and about a boy struggling to make sense of events, both public and private, that he has been exposed to far too soon.

The story begins in 1979, eight days after 9 year-old Suleiman’s neighbor, Ustath Rashid, "vanished like a grain of salt in water" after being carted off by Revolutionary Guards. Suleiman's baba, Faraj, is away on a business trip, and his mother is getting over an "illness." But when Suleiman goes shopping with his mum, he sees his baba downtown, wearing unfamiliar sunglasses and disappearing into a strange building. Nor is his mother's illness anything so straightforward as a cold.

His mum is only "ill" when his dad is away, Suleiman explains. She gets her "medicine" in bottles wrapped in black plastic bags that the baker keeps hidden under his counter.

On those nights, Suleiman is afraid to leave her alone, and she regales him with stories, like his hero Scheherezade. Only instead of Sinbad, Aladdin, and Ali Baba, his mom, Najwa, tells him about how, at 14, she was forced to leave school and marry an older man she had never met as a punishment. Her crime was holding hands in a cafe with a boy.

But much of what Najwa tells her son is difficult for a 9-year-old to bear. "The things she told me pressed down on my chest, so heavy that it seemed impossible to carry on living without spilling them. I didn't want to break my promise – the promise she always forced me to give, sometimes 30 times over in one night, not to tell, to swear on her life, again and again...."

And when Suleiman can't hold the words back she reproaches him, saying, "I beg you, don't embarrass me.... A boy your age should never speak of such things."

Although a compulsive storyteller while drunk, Najwa has little patience for Scheherezade. "Scheherezade was a coward who accepted slavery over death," she snaps at the son she calls her "prince," retelling the final chapter with feminist fury, as Scheherezade gathers her three sons about her and begs to live.

" 'To live,' she repeated. 'And not because she had as much right to as he, but because if he were to kill her his sons would live "motherless" ... My guess: five, maybe ten years at the most before she got the sword.' "

But in daily life, Najwa makes the same choice as the scorned queen.

"Here it's either silence or exile, walk by the wall or leave," as she explains to Moosa, an Egyptian friend whose business schemes (Polish tires, chickens) are a source of much amusement. She drinks because she's terrified: Suleiman's father is a political dissident. During his "business trips," he writes the prodemocracy pamphlets Suleiman and his friends see people ripping up on their doorsteps.

Now that their neighbour has been interrogated on live TV, Najwa is certain that Faraj will be next. She burns all his books (except one that Suleiman hides in his own room) and hangs a giant picture of "The Guide" on their wall. And when Faraj doesn't come home, she bakes a cake and goes to a high-ranking neighbour to beg for the life of the man of whom she once fainted at first sight. Matar's writing is strikingly poetic. He brings as much detail to a boy's whimsical thought of mulberries as a crop planted by angels to remind Adam and Eve of paradise as he does to a public execution. And that detail helps to bring to life a place where the TV programs shift from interrogations to a still life of pink flowers, and where people are hanged in stadiums from basketball hoops, to the cheering of crowds.

While it's never a good idea to read too much autobiography into a novel, author Hisham Matar does share certain characteristics with his narrator. Both were 9 when they left Libya – although Matar was accompanied by his parents, and Suleiman is sent abroad alone. Matar's father was also a dissident, although he was not politically active until after the family was living in Egypt. In 1990, his father was kidnapped from Cairo and returned to Tripoli, where he was imprisoned and tortured. The family hasn't heard any news since 1995.

"Nationalism is as thin as a thread, perhaps that's why many feel it must be anxiously guarded," Suleiman writes years later from his home in Cairo, where his "stray dog" status means that he can't return to Libya and his family isn't allowed to leave.

The too-hasty coda is the only weak part of the novel. The grown-up Suleiman glosses over the experience of exile in a way that seems at odds with the sensitive, confused child he once was.

That said, "In the Country of Men" is an eloquent and absorbing account of life in this benighted country during a particularly dark period of its recent past....

From Libya’s Tripoli International Airport (now back in action after the civil war), I pay the princely sum of £96.60 for a flight on Tunisair to Tunis’ Carthage Airport in Tunisia. The flight takes 1 hour and 10 minutes, leaving at 3.25pm, but I arrive in Tunis at 3.35pm due to the hour’s time difference, for the next leg of my round the world trip...

Taxi to Cairo: Viewing Egypt from the Back of a Cab

“Taxi” is an interesting patchwork of a novel by the freshly-minted Egyptian journalist-commentator-filmmaker cum writer Khaled al-Khamissi. The fifty-eight chapters that comprise this unusual book represent fifty-eight separate taxi rides taken by the narrator, who is merely the guise of a thinly-veiled al-Khamissi. This work is, in some sense, an ethnographic novel in that it attempts to portray the working lives of Cairo's 80,000+ taxi drivers through punctuated scenes (chapters) which are a cross-section of that part of society.

Al-Khamissi's portrayal of the Cairene cabby is definitely sympathetic though not patronising. While giving due credence to the unique social and political perspectives that taxi drivers maintain by virtue of their near-constant physical presence on the maddening city streets, he does not shy away from revealing some of the wackier encounters with those drivers who spout conspiracy theories, conservatism and tales of faux poverty.

There are moments of knowing and astute political irony in Taxi. An example of the meta-critique of Egyptian government that pervades the book occurs in chapter seven, where the driver laments Egypt's arcane statutes regarding seatbelts and the myriad laws and tariffs and cost of it all to be borne by the poor taxi driver. At the end of that particular encounter after mentioning how he skirts the law by only installing a decorative rather than functional seat belt to appease the authorities, the driver tells the narrator: "We live a lie and believe it. The government's only role is to check that we believe the lie, don't you think?"

Mr. al-Khamissi works hard at being representational of the whole of Egyptian society through the work of the commentary and dialogue offered by his characters. Yet in his desire for a complete cross-section of Cairo taxi culture all of the offstage laboring by the author began to seep into the text. The first twenty-five episodes are interesting and insightful but they eventually began to feel like a gimmick and came perilously close to monotony. If it were a television series it would have been canceled after half a season.

But it is not episodic television, it is is a book, and its annoyances do not detract from its originality as an interesting new voice in pop-Arab fiction. The chapters provide often captivating nuggets of insight into the concerns and ebbs and flows of daily life in one of the world's largest cities, and most important countries. A helpful glossary in the back is included for readers less familiar with details of the culture.

Jonathan Wright's English translation of the colloquial Egyptian Arabic is good though a bit uneven. Yet Wright is to be commended for taking a frenetic text and rendering it into something readable and perhaps appealing for an English-speaking audience. We ought to have more popular fiction in translation and not just higher-brow literary novels (“Taxi” has been on Arabic language bestsellers lists for more than a year).

Credit to D. Chaudoir for this review.

In reaching my next destination, again, I go for the flight option, given the overland issues in this region. Therefore, for around $300, I take an 8am Royal Jordanian flight from Cairo International Airport, arriving back in Amman, Jordan at 10.15am (allowing for the time difference). After a short stopover there, where I take a quick lunch break, I am on the 11.40am flight to Tripoli, touching down at 1.45pm, and visiting Libya courtesy of “In The Country of Men” by native author Hisham Matar, of which more in my next post…

Leap of Faith: the Queen of Jordan’s Memoirs of an Unexpected Life

The Jordanian book on my journey is an autobiography of Queen Noor al Hussein (born as Lisa Halaby into a distinguished Arab-American family and raised amid privilege in the US, while visiting her father in Jordan she was casually introduced on the airport runway to King Hussein. After a whirlwind, secret courtship Lisa Halaby became Noor Al Hussein, Queen of Jordan).

The sub-title of this engaging book is Memoirs of an Unexpected Life. For a young American woman to marry an Arab king was indeed unexpected but not entirely unpredicted. At a farewell dinner at a restaurant in Tehran, an acquaintance told Lisa Halaby her fortune in the traditional Middle Eastern way, by reading her coffee cup. He turned over the cup, flipped it back, and studied the patterns within. "You will return to Arabia," he predicted. "And you will marry someone highborn, an aristocrat from the land of your ancestors." That man turned out to be King Hussein of Jordan.

Halaby was born into a prominent Arab-American family. Her father, Najeeb Halaby, was a successful businessman and public servant but a demanding and difficult individual. The father's relentless perfectionism could not be reconciled with the mother's quest for family peace and the marriage was dissolved.

As a child Lisa was earnest and introverted, a loner by temperament, and she was to remain impatient with small-talk and gossip. Part of this social awkwardness, she confesses, is rooted in her relationship with her father. One of the positive results of growing up in this "moderately dysfunctional American family" was self-reliance. Lisa joined the first freshman class at Princeton to accept women, graduating in 1974 with a degree in architecture and urban planning.

Leap of Faith is the story of her remarkable journey into Hussein's heart and their 21 years of marriage, ending with the king's death in 1999. For Hussein it was evidently love at first sight. For the young, independent-minded American woman, the courtship, over long evenings in the palace, involved some doubts. The king was a widower with eight children from three marriages and a reputation as a playboy. "I will not deny that the idea of being his fourth wife, or anybody's fourth wife, was troubling to me," she writes. But the king was an assiduous suitor and would even sing to her. Though she was not as drawn to the Swedish group Abba as he was, she was charmed when he would croon "Take a chance on me".

Having accepted the royal proposition of marriage, Lisa Halaby changed her name to Noor Al Hussein, the "Light of Hussein". She also converted to Islam and began in earnest to learn Arabic. The love affair with Hussein developed into a love affair with his desert kingdom.

As well as being an intimate portrait of a marriage, Leap of Faith reflects a deep commitment to the people, culture, and natural beauty of Jordan. "I had found myself spellbound," writes Noor, "by the serene expanse of desert landscape washed golden by the retreating sun at dusk. I was overwhelmed by an extraordinary sensation of belonging, an almost mystical sense of peace."

There was precious little peace, however, to be found inside the royal palace. Noor knew she had to make some adjustments to her new environment but she found the lack of privacy irksome and unsettling. Court officials were ubiquitous and they constantly intruded on her private space. Over the years she came to realise that some of this dissonance was cultural - "the difference between a western sense of privacy and personal space and an eastern emphasis on communal identity and space". This was a characteristically charitable explanation for the conduct of the courtiers.

Noor also had to fight to carve out a meaningful role for herself. Many in Jordan thought a queen should be a glamorous figure on a pedestal, perhaps engaged from a distance in charity work. Noor had no intention of being a mere figurehead and spending her time simply opening bazaars and expositions. On the contrary, she wanted to be involved in tackling real problems.

Through the United Nations and other organisations, Noor became involved in issues that were important to her, such as global peacekeeping, refugee assistance and the Land Mine Ban Treaty. Most of her time and energy, however, were taken up with work in the areas of women's and children's welfare, human rights, health, education, and the environment.

She became acutely aware that all these problems, tackled in isolation by individual ministries and charities, were fundamentally inter-related. Her role, as she saw it, was to serve as a catalyst for consensus-building and action. In 1985, the Noor Al Hussein Foundation was established. Its aim was to provide strategies for sustainable development and integrating efforts to tackle these problems in a concerted manner.

While King Hussein supported his wife's domestic initiatives, he himself was mainly preoccupied with foreign affairs and more particularly with the quest for peace in the Middle East in the aftermath of the June 1967 war. Politics thus became a constant companion to Queen Noor throughout the 21 years of her marriage.

She is a highly sophisticated political animal with strong liberal leanings, and a perceptive judge of personalities. In writing this autobiography, she relied not just on her memory but also on a journal she kept intermittently. Her book contains fascinating accounts of encounters with American, Arab, Palestinian and Israeli leaders. It also sheds a great deal of new light on inter-Arab relations and on the diplomacy surrounding the Arab-Israeli conflict.

One theme that crops up again and again in Noor's narrative is the frustration and anger she feels in the face of American double standards towards the Middle East. From Jordan she began to see the land of her birth through new eyes - and the image that America projected was not a positive one.

Noor had grown up believing in America's commitment to freedom, justice, and human rights, but she gives many examples of Washington's failure to uphold these principles in its treatment of Jordan. She complains, with justice, that America's support for Israel has too often been at the expense of Arab human rights and in violation of international law and United Nations resolutions.

Throughout the 1980s Noor undertook several intensive speaking tours in America, grueling two-week marathons of speeches and interviews. The American media offered few perspectives on the Middle East other than that of Israel. Noor was uniquely placed to educate her fellow Americans about the problems of the region but it was an uphill struggle.

The warmest reception Hussein received in America was in 1994 when he and Itzhak Rabin went to the White House to issue the Washington Declaration, ending the conflict between Jordan and Israel. Members of the Jordanian delegation could now see first-hand the magical hold that Israel had on the American political psyche.

On at least one issue Noor was at odds with her husband and the leaders of her adopted country: press freedom. From the first years of their marriage, she lobbied her husband and his key officials to reconsider personal and institutional freedoms. The press in Jordan, though privately owned, was effectively government-controlled. Truly independent reporting did not exist. A combination of conservatism and insecurity made the rulers wary of allowing the people to read dissenting opinions. By her own account, Noor's pleas fell on largely deaf ears. In this respect she was a bit like a lighthouse in the desert: brilliant and illuminating but of little use to her immediate environment.

However, politics aside, there is also a very human story here; and the final chapters that deal with the King’s death after a long struggle with cancer are genuinely moving.

All in all, I felt this was a fascinating insight into a rarified element of Jordan – whilst not representative of the day to day lives of most ordinary citizens, did at least give an insight into the wider politics of the country and, through Queen Noor al Hussein’s work with various charities, an insight into some of the wider issues affected the country’s populace…

From Jordan I head to Egypt. Whilst this country has been making international headlines of late due to its political and government issues; I shall be taking a change of focus and spending my time there in the company of various Cairo cabbies, through fictional monologues contained in the book, “Taxi” by native author Khaled Al Khamissi.

Having researched overland routes to Cairo from Amman, it seems all of these involve travelling back into Israel and out again, which given the problems encountered in my last two trips I decide to avoid! So, once again I take to the skies with Royal Jordanian airlines and fly from Amman Queen Alia International airport, leaving at 9pm, and arrive 1 and a half hours later at Cairo International Airport at 9.30pm (allowing for the hours’ time difference); for the princely sum of US $239. The travel to my final destination in Egypt is easy – I just get into a taxi!

Israel: Amos Oz finds Poetry in a Sea of Humanity

On arriving at a book to represent Israel, I was in two minds. One cannot consider Israel without considering Palestine and the wider Middle Eastern ‘problem.’ However, whilst I chose a book on the conflict’s impact upon Palestine in my previous trip as I felt this was a story that needed to be told, I felt that maybe more would be achieved by - rather than a mirror story set in Israel – picking a work that went beyond the conflict and into a more personal account of this country. As such, I am delighted that I came across “The Same Sea” by Amos Oz, one of Israel’s most renowned authors, and one who has been heavily involved in his nation's issues, critical of the wrong turnings on the road to a settlement, and ever hopeful of a humane solution.

In this respect, you might say that “The Same Sea” is the most timely of books to come out of Israel. Not because it addresses the issues of conflict, but rather, as Oz suggests at one point here, because it steadfastly does not: 'At times like these, quiet is the most precious commodity in the country,' his narrator observes. 'And let there be no misunderstanding, I'm talking about quiet, definitely not about silence.'

“The Same Sea” is a novel in verse - though some of the poetry is possibly lost in translation. Nevertheless, the presentation - brief chapters of varying length (and form), each a 'poem' in and of itself but, as different threads of one story, all connected - is very effective, and makes for an impressive whole.

The story is fairly simple. The central character is Albert Danon, a recently widowed accountant. His son, Enrico (called 'Rico') is travelling abroad - in the Himalayas when the book begins, then making his way through South-East Asia - reluctant to return to Israel. Rico's girlfriend, Dita, gets ripped-off by a film producer (she's written a movie script) and turns to Albert for help - and moves in with him. Albert fixes things, and the movie producer turns out not to be such a bad guy after all. Albert still misses his wife terribly. Dita's presence in the household is welcome but also causes him some inner turmoil - and then there's the other woman in his life, Bettine, who feels more strongly for him than he does for her.

Even the narrator pops up:

The fictional Narrator puts the cap back on his pen and pushes away the writing pad. He is tired. And his back aches. He asks himself how on earth he came to write such a story. Bulgarian, Bat Yam, written in verse and even, here and there, in rhyme.

It's all fairly simple, the short episodes moving back and forth among the characters, looking towards the past, present, and future. Yet for all that - or because of all that, because of the glimpses rather than detailed, continuous narrative, and the somewhat lighter touch of poetic rather than prose renderings - it is a completely gripping tale, these lives and what happens to them all of great interest. In true-life form, the story meanders back and forth, among the characters and in time, the everyday and the exceptional easily mixed, occasionally confused, yet with Oz never trying to explain too much.

“The Same Sea” seems almost unambitious, and yet in these small, intertwined fates and in this presentation is a more powerful and effecting work than many far longer novels. Very impressive, highly recommended.

(Complete Review)

And so, happy to have found such an extraordinary - and unexpected - gem on my travels, I leave Israel for neighbouring Jordan. I also leave fiction for a while as the next work is an autobiography of Queen Noor al Hussein (born as Lisa Halaby into a distinguished Arab-American family and raised amid privilege in the US, while visiting her father in Jordan she was casually introduced on the airport runway to King Hussein. After a whirlwind, secret courtship Lisa Halaby became Noor Al Hussein, Queen of Jordan).

Having gone through the palaver of travelling in and out of Israel and Palestine over the past few weeks, I decide to pay a bit extra and fly direct to Amman in Jordan for my next leg. I take a Royal Jordanian flight from Tel Aviv Yafo airport at 8.25 in the morning (for US$281) and 45 minutes later I am touching down in Amman, the capital of Jordan…