Salut!

Expat life: Agatha Christie and the anatomy of the tour group

Ever wondered, when on holiday, about your fellow travellers? Exploring a little of China, I found time to cast a whimsical eye over mine ...

Agatha Christie had a gift for dreaming up random groups of people, brought together in some common pursuit only to be torn apart by murder and mystery.

None of my travelling companions during a short trip to China met an unfortunate end, I am relieved to report.

Food ethics: a new dimension to the foie gras debate

Plenty of people find the whole concept of foie gras utterly objectionable. Witness the prohibition movement sweeping parts of the western world, notably America.

For every person who says le gavage, the feeding - or gorging - of ducks and geese to fatten their livers, is painless, there is another to denounce the process as an indefensibly cruel farming method that should have no place in humane society.

Expat life: pandas galore, but anyone for fried scorpion?

So yes, China was wonderful. And no, I didn't bring back giant pandas for the Salut! readers who asked for them. Indeed, the panda population grew by at least two during my visit (assuming there were not also some deaths) ...

Tai Shan and Mei Lan beat us into the airport serving the south-western Chinese city of Chengdu by about 24 hours.

Their arrival represented living proof that – trade and Taiwan apart – China and the United States can occasionally get along with each other.

It helps that all the world seems to love giant pandas.

How to combat the web parasites

A special phrase now appears on some of the rogue comments placed at Salut! by computers masquerading as people. Read on and you'll see, from this version of a similar posting at Salut! Sunderland, what I mean ...

As reported here recently, Salut! - and its sister sites Salut! Sunderland , Salut! Live and Salut! North - have been infested by an ugly, virulent pest called the website parasite.

The aim of the people posting comments which appear at first glance to be genuine, but can quickly be seen to be bogus and probably generated by computers, is to produce artificially inflated stats for visits to their own, usually unrelated sites or promote Viagra, medicines or whatever else they are trying to flog.

Expat life: transports of delight

It has been, as Salut! readers know, holiday time. More on the visit to China will follow, but preparations for my first holiday since returning from the UAE took the mind back to all the travels I made while there ...

The longer you live in the UAE, the fewer the blank pages likely to be found in your passport.

That sweeping statement carries, if I am honest, no trace of statistical authority. But with so many intriguing destinations within easy reach, it does seem probable that anyone with a thirst for adventure will make the most of the opportunities.

If you hold a passport of one of the EU countries, and visit another, a simple look at the relevant page is usually enough for an official to wave you through. For the expatriate based in the Emirates, each journey in the region stands a good chance of being to somewhere requiring a visa to enter and some other stamp on departure.

By the time you read this, I should be just about back from a short holiday in China. The visa occupies a whole page of my passport; two other full pages bear witness to trips from the UAE to India and a fourth provides proof of my residential status in the UAE between 2007 and 2009.

In between are all the little stamps that remind me of the discoveries I was able to make around the Middle East. There were three trips to Oman and one each to Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Egypt. Since I also managed to visit all seven emirates, it is just as well that stamps or visas were not required for passing from one to another. Space for journeys still to come would otherwise be running short even though I have had my current passport for only three years.

All those official stamps represent a lot of time spent standing in queues, at consulates or airports. Obtaining visas for India involved by far the most time-consuming procedures. Syria was simple, if only because I was arriving by road from Beirut and was therefore just one more western traveller. I had been warned that applying for a visa, as a journalist, before departure from Abu Dhabi would have been an optimistic initiative doomed to failure.


But for all our complaints about the bureaucracy involved, I certainly savour my own memories of getting around the region and slightly beyond, not least because so much of it was to places that might have remained unvisited by me; I regret having been unable to add Iran, Saudi Arabia and Yemen – among others – to my itinerary.

Back in Europe, opportunities for private voyages have so far been more limited, though in the course of duty for this newspaper I have become reacquainted with parts of France and the UK that I had all but forgotten.

It seems to me that travel brings greater satisfaction than most human activities. Samuel Johnson may have had a point when he said that when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life. His next few words – “for there is in London all that life can afford”– are more open to challenge, as I hope to report after my trip to China.

* From my East/West column in The National, Abu Dhabi.

Expat life: punishing the victims of crime

Another emergency posting to keep Salut! ticking over. Familiar territory to anyone living in the UK, but the sort of topic that arouses a lot of interest overseas* ...

Sitting, as I once did, in the UAE, where serious crime remains rare, it is easy to feel smug about casual and often fatal violence in the West.