M O S C O W - Passport magazine

Travel
Dangerous places
worth visiting!
Text and photos, Luc Jones
Is the world we live in really so dangerous,
or are we just falling for western
propaganda aimed at scaring you into
watching more news and being petrified
at leaving the comfort of your own
home?
As a student in Moscow in 1993, I spent
a day with the BBC and asked Angus Roxborough
why the western media portrayed
Russia is such a negative light. His
response was that people back home
wanted to see something newsworthy
that was out of the ordinary—an empty
shop, preferably with a long queue
stretching out of the door and with any
luck a babushka waving her fist. If you really
played your cards right, the Russian
mafia might be trying to sell plutonium
to Saddam Hussein, or an entire village
going blind after an attempt at making
samogon and distilling it at the wrong
temperature.
Now that’s news. Nobody wants to
hear about the trains running on time.
Well, I know a few London commuters
who might beg to differ as that probably
would make the news in the UK, but back
to the main point of the article: how dangerous
are some of the world’s hotspots?
12 January 2011
I thought I’d check a few out, mainly so
that you don’t have to, and I’m still here in
one piece to tell the tale!
Venezuela
There is a lot more to Venezuela than
simply oil and Hugo Chavez’s tub-thumping.
The capital, Caracas, does suffer from
spates of street crime—although much of
this is either turf wars or opportunist—so
take the usual precautions, dress down,
don’t make it blatantly obvious that you
are a tourist, avoid flashing cash/jewellery
around, and be on your guard at night;
best to take taxis.
Having said that, this is a big country
with lots to see without fear. Sun seekers
head for Margarita island, whilst I flew
down to Canaima in the middle of the
jungle to see the famous Angel Falls, the
world’s highest.
One travel tip: you can get much better
exchange rates than the banks offer by
changing money on the black market—
this is the norm and most hotel receptionists
and taxi drivers will happily oblige.
This is one place to avoid using plastic as
you’ll be charged the official rate, which
makes for a more expensive trip. Likewise
avoid ATMs (although I couldn’t find any
that would accept foreign bank cards). On
the whole it’s an inexpensive holiday destination,
and the Russians are now coming
thanks to the recently installed visafree
regime—shame it’s such a long way
away or I’d be back again in a heartbeat!
Yemen
You have to feel sorry for Yemen sometimes.
How they didn’t make it into Bush’s
Axis of Evil, Allah only knows. Their President
might be firmly anti-terrorist and
we were warmly welcomed by the locals
that we met on a recent visit, yet there is
more to this place than you’ll read in the
Daily Mail.
Yemen is poor, and has an exploding
population, a problem not helped by an
increasing number of Somali refugees. It
also has few natural resources and even
fewer friends. OK, this isn’t Ethiopia in the
1980s, but it’s a world away from the Skyscrapers
of Dubai. This is a fiercely clandriven
society and the authorities don’t
have full control of some of the more
mountainous regions up in the north
where head-bangers are freer to plot to
destroy the world’s infidels.
So my simple advice is—don’t go
there! Stick to the beautiful capital Sana’a
and get lost walking around the ancient
buildings and markets, where you can