UnPlaned

Since university, I’ve been aware of the story of Palestine. I attended some meetings, and marched in protest once or twice. My girlfriend worked for a summer in a Palestinian refugee camp in the Lebanon, and came back full of fire for the cause. England and work and climate change, though, have come to take [...]

Noa’s mum is a smiling, generous soul, and we spend two well-fed nights at her family house. The house is in a suburb of Tel Aviv, with a green garden and a dog brimming with affection. Pictures of siblings line the walls. One is of a sister doing a silly face with a rifle in [...]

We plan to pick up our return Jordan visas in Tel Aviv. The visas we got going into Jordan the first time carry no indication of where they were issued; we assume visas issued in Israel won’t either, and therefore won’t be a problem on the trip back through Syria. One call to the Jordan [...]

A taxi takes us from the border post into the resort town of Eilat, where we’ll be getting our bus to Tel Aviv. The town seems to be an extension of the crossing: every roundabout is decorated with suspended dolphins and angelfish, sculptures coexisting over blue gravel. Brightly clothed Israelis jog or ride mountainbikes on [...]

Because of the history of war between Syria and Israel, Syria will not allow anyone to cross their borders carrying any evidence of a visit to Israel in their passports. This makes this next part of the UnPlaned journey risky, there being five points during its course which might leave us with such evidence: leaving [...]

We didn’t realise how British our play is. Rehearsing in our mosquito-bloodied hotel room the day before the show, we’re struck that line after line would be impossible to understand unless you’re personally familiar with the land of Tesco, Glastonbury and the BNP (the three pillars of Britishness). We’re also getting nervous about its very [...]

I wake before I’ve slept enough, and climb the stairs for breakfast. The lounge opens onto an eighth-floor view of Midan Tahrir, and I stand on the balcony looking out. Under a hazy blue sky, a metropolis spreads out before me; a grey chaos of roofs cluttered with junk, broken awnings and twenty million satellite [...]

The port at Nuweiba is starkly different from the Jordan side; un-tarmac’d and loud. Men drag trolleys heaped impossibly high with beds, bundles and office chairs into an open-sided iron hangar, where everything is sausage-squeezed through X-ray hatches. A lovely young Egyptian dad has offered to guide us through, and with his help we find [...]

Aqaba is where we take the 1 o’ clock ferry to Egypt, and our mini-bus from Petra arrives in plenty of time. 11 am. We saunter to a bus, and excited when it sets us down, stride to the ferry port in the sun’s blaze. It’s industrial-estate-on-sea, container ships, cranes and concrete, and we find [...]

Going South in a V.I.P coach fitted out for disco midgets, no space for sleep or knees. The flickering TV screen plays loud footage of Syrian weddings, camera panning from one bored face to the next, a waxed male singing Arab love songs with a passion. Welcome to the Hasemite kingdom of Jordan. After fifteen [...]