Middle East - Anthony Ham [540]
Depending on the country, you can get them either before you go, along the way or, increasingly frequently, at the airport or border. The advantage of predeparture collection is that it doesn’t waste travelling time, and ‘difficult’ embassies are sometimes less difficult when you’re in your own country – they can usually explain things in your own language and that seemingly meaningless, but utterly essential, document they require is much easier to find back home. It’s also true that if you’re turned down in your home country, there’s usually nothing to stop you trying again while on the road.
WOMEN TRAVELLERS
Some women imagine that travel to the Middle East is both difficult and dangerous. In reality, there’s no reason why women can’t enjoy the region as much as their male counterparts. In fact, some seasoned women travellers consider their gender a help, not a hindrance, in the Middle East and you’ll likely meet more women travellers having the time of their lives than come across those doing it tough.
For more information on the situation in specific countries, see the Women Travellers section in the Directory of each individual country chapter.
Attitudes Towards Women
Some of the biggest misunderstandings between Middle Easterners and Westerners occur over the issue of women. Half-truths and stereotypes exist on both sides: many Westerners assume all Middle Eastern women are veiled, repressed victims, while a large number of locals see Western women as sex-obsessed and immoral.
For many Middle Easterners, both men and women, the role of a woman is specifically defined: she is mother and matron of the household. The man is the provider. However, as with any society, generalisations can be misleading and the reality is far more nuanced. There are thousands of middle- and upper-middle-class professional women in the Arab World who, like their counterparts in the West, juggle work and family responsibilities. Among the working classes or in conservative rural areas, where adherence to tradition is strongest, the ideal may be for women to concentrate on home and family, but economic reality means that millions of women are forced to work (but are still responsible for all domestic chores).
The issue of sex is where differences between Western and Middle Eastern women are most apparent. Premarital sex (or, indeed, any sex outside marriage) is taboo, although, as with anything forbidden, it still happens. Nevertheless, it’s the exception rather than the rule – and that goes for men as well as women. However, for women the issue is potentially far more serious. With occasional exceptions among the upper classes, women are expected to be virgins when they marry and a family’s reputation can rest upon this. In such a context, the restrictions placed on a young girl – no matter how onerous they may seem to a Westerner – are intended to protect her and her reputation from the potentially disastrous attentions of men.
The presence of foreign women presents, in the eyes of some Middle Eastern men, a chance to get around these norms with ease and without consequences. That this is even possible is heavily reinforced by distorted impressions gained from Western TV and by the comparatively liberal behaviour of foreign women in the country. As one hopeful young man in Egypt remarked, when asked why he persisted in harassing every Western woman he saw: ‘For every 10 that say no, there’s one that says yes.’
What to Expect
Women travellers are no different from their male counterparts in that meeting local people