Middle East - Anthony Ham [538]
Logistically, travelling on your own in the Middle East is as easy as travelling with others – you don’t need two people to buy a bus ticket or arrange accommodation. More importantly, you wake up in the morning and the day is yours and yours alone, thereby allowing you to have the trip of your choosing, rather than one held back by the compromises inherent in taking other people into account. The opportunity to meet locals is greatly enhanced by travelling on your own rather than in a larger group. Few people like to travel alone 24/7, but solo travellers who want to come into the fold or simply a few hours’ company can easily meet other travellers wherever there’s a travellers’ scene, such as in İstanbul, Damascus or Dahab.
The downside of travelling alone is that it can prove to be a little more expensive, not least because hotel rooms generally cost more for individual travellers (a single room is rarely half the price of a double room). Although many hotels organise tours to surrounding sights, organising your own taxi will invariably prove pricey unless you can find other travellers to share costs.
Women travellers often travel alone through the Middle East without any problem, although we’d probably only recommend it only for seasoned travellers or those who have visited the region before. A woman travelling solo is still rare enough to draw attention, and although most of that will be benign, you’ll almost certainly attract a following of male admirers.
For more advice for women travellers, see opposite.
Telephone
In most countries of the Middle East, the cheapest way to make international calls is at your friendly local internet café for a fraction of the cost of calling on a normal land line. Staff at these cafés (most of which are equipped with webcams, microphones and headsets) are generally pretty tech-savvy, and can sell you the relevant card (there are usually a number of brands to choose from) and show you how to use it. Most internet cafés will also let you use operators such as Skype (www.skype.com) – remember to take your sign-in details.
If you’re a traditionalist, or if internet-connected phone calls aren’t possible, head for the public telephone office, which usually sits adjacent to the post office. Here, you can generally make operator-connected calls or buy cards for use in phone booths around the city; kiosks dotted around most major cities generally sell the same cards. There are also privately run call centres (although many of these have three-minute call minimums), where you can make international calls and send faxes. Costs for international calls start at about US$3 per minute, and a few countries offer reduced rates at night.
If cash is tight, many travellers make an international call and then make their (long-suffering) parents call them back later at their hotel. If that’s the case, the least you can do is buy them a calling card back home before you leave, so that they don’t dread every time they hear from you.
Mobile Phones
Mobile networks in Middle Eastern countries all work on the GSM system, and it’s extremely rare that your mobile brought from home won’t automatically link up with a local operator. That’s fine for receiving calls, but roaming charges can make for a nasty surprise back home if you’ve made a few calls while away. If you plan to be in a country for a while, making calls while there, your best option is to buy a local SIM card – an easy process in every country of the region.
See the Telephone section in the relevant country chapters for further details.
TIME
Egypt, Israel and the Palestinian Territories, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Syria and Turkey are two hours ahead of GMT/UTC, with Iraq three hours ahead. Of the countries covered by this book, only Jordan does not operate daylight-saving hours.
Time is something that Middle Eastern people always seem to have plenty of; something that should take five minutes will invariably take an hour. Trying to speed things