Saturday, November 11, 2017

Therapy of Nations - London to Aqaba


It's a familiar feeling - Waking at 4am, making marmalade sandwiches (to use up the last of the pot) and heading to Dover. How many times have I done this, for tours, for holidays? This time is special though - I am headed for Africa. With a smattering of Europe and a dollop of the Middle East. It's raining and cold but the Blackwall Tunnel is nice and warm with pollution. All in all a fitting parting shot from good old Blighty. A quick stopover in a campsite in Alsace Lorraine, lunch and a castle in Liechtenstein (country number 61... but who's counting...? :) ) and I pop out of the foggy alps into Milano by the second afternoon. My friend Benedetta is waiting outside her apartment for me, she's been watching my online tracker so she knows exactly when I will come around the corner - staking me out pleases her inner detective.

If 'Milan' is a verb, and I'm pretty sure it is an action, then that's what we do for the rest of the weekend - zip to exhibitions and long lunches and late drinks with buzzy arty people in her pet cinquecento.
I floor it across the boring flat part of Italy that leads to Trieste but there the Slovenian and Croatian mountains start to bring a breath of feathery forested magic. In Zadar I meet Tina on a darkened street near her boyfriends place. She installs me at her own empty apartment across town that is eerily reminiscent of Papagajka, the film I helped to make in Bosnia that she acted in. I stop in Neum, Bosnia's tiny slice of coast, for a pizza to reinforce the point.

In Montenegro I am zipping along the beautiful Bay of Kotor. Maybe a litle too zippy as a policeman jumps out from behind a tree with a big red stop sign. I leave him in the dust - good practice for the third world cops I expect to encounter further down the road. The universe has its way of making its point though and not 10 minutes later I am stuck in a gigantic traffic jam for 2 hours waiting for a fatal traffic accident to be dealt with. By then it's dark and my iPhone has become petulant so the best thing I can do is follow a fellow biker called Kurt to the hostel he is staying at. It's called "High Hostel" and it lives up to its name with an insanely steep and crumbling track to get to it. So much so that I fall over. Again the universe waves its magic wand and delivers me a big strong bloke from Yorkshire to help pick everything up. We build a fire from shipping pallets and while I gaze into the flames, Kurt, a big Tinder-jockey sets him self up dates with a Russian girl, a Swiss girl and a French girl.

The Albanian border is my kind of Border. The two countries guards actually sit across a table for each other and having passed my passport in one window the Montenegrin guy passes it across the table to his Albanian counterpart and then he hands it back to me out of another window. The state of logistical bliss is only enhanced by the old lady in a shawl shooing her cows out of my path. I contentedly breathe in the woodsmoke of a country I feel great affection for and deftly dodge vintage Mercedes (Albania was the European clearing house for stolen Mercedes in the 80s and 90s under Hoxha) as they careen around horses pulling carts carrying whole families sitting on their crops. Around Skodër there are at least 30 petrol stations, most of them sporting huge "Mastercard" and "Visa" signs, so I figure it might be possible to get across the country without getting any Leks but when I ask if I can pay with a card, they all look at me as if I were insane. "Cash Only!"

The road up into the mountains is gorgeous but the Macedonians lever 50 euros out of me for one day's insurance.. It does buy me some beautiful scenery as I head through Mavrovo National Park to reach Skopje for the night. At a junction outside of Skopje, left is Bulgaria and right is Greece. I choose Greece to avoid a second border insurance robbery.

Turkey is unavoidable however and they gouge a whopping 190 euros. I try to wheedle but he just grins.

I hit Istanbul rush hour with a vengeance. I don't think I've ever seen so many stationary cars but I take a cue from a local biker and weave and chase an ambulance and then I am really enjoying myself, starting to reignite a very particular euphoric feeling that motorbikes and life outside the first world give me.

My friend Tara, a US filmmaker, welcomes me to her hip little apartment down the hill from the Galata Tower in Karaköy. We have a lovely evening catching-up but at 6am the week of long riding days catches up with me and I wake, literally screaming, to an excruciating leg cramp. Sorry Tara!

Istanbul is having its Biennale so I can get into a bunch of museums for free, so once the ritual of SIM cards and laundry is done I check out some very cool exhibitions at the Arter and the Modern.

Tara's apartment is ruled by her cat, Pasha, she rescued. I spend a long time trying to entice her from behind the washing machine. The catnip I bought doesn't help and she just stares at me with big angry eyes. Some horrible person really did a number on her. Next morning we can't shower because she is glowering in there.
I try to find something on Wikipedia but it doesn't load and Tara says oh yes Erdoğan has stopped that - I get a Tor Browser to spite him - strange to be in a country with real censorship - Tara, as a journalist, has had to be careful what she says in print. At the post office I am rushing to pay my motorway toll. I jump the queue and no-one bats an eye. Bloody foreigners they're thinking. The guy who is helping me disappears mysteriously then reappears with a comedy-large stack of brown folders which he proceeds to count very slowly. No! Then he tells me I can pay the toll anytime in the next 2 weeks. Yes! No toll for me - I will be in Israel by then - so long suckers!

We go to Qnuysho, the shelter for Asyrian kids that Tara volunteers at, with her friend Jaman, a musician from Aleppo who is living a limbo life here, very restricted by the Syrian ID he has been issued with. He tells me how he was smuggled into Lebanon in a compartment under the passenger seat of a car. After the kids clamber all over us, we sip Arabic coffee, heavy on the Cardamom - I get quite partial to this as somehow it does not give me the jitters in the same way that normal coffee does. Then Jaman plays guitar for the kids in a chaotic sort of show with the kids overflowing in all directions.

Around midnight I head up to a lookout on the Asian side with Jaman and 3 of his friends. One of them shows me a scar on his stomach. He was at a demonstration in his hometown Daraa, which is where the revolution started and the soldiers opened fire with no warning. Hospital would mean prison so he underwent surgery on the street - they used a coke can with a straw to pressure-flush the wound.
On my way out of Istanbul I gaffer my numberplate, which has cracked - I don't want to imagine the world of pain I would be in at borders if half of it fell off. It pours cold and misty all the way to Safranbolu and then I wander drenched and miserable trying to find the guesthouse. A lovely guy from another guesthouse puts his coat on and leaves his cosy station to help show me the way. One 15 minute scalding shower and I am almost human again. I wander the rabbit warrens of this pretty Ottoman town and eat "Manti" - a local dish a bit like ravioli.
In Göreme, I am excited to see the hobbit cave houses that featured in last year's "Winter's Sleep". At nearby Zelve, I have the place to myself. Bliss! The rock formations look like whipped meringue. The cave churches with bits of frescoes still clinging on. The 'pigeon houses' with madman steps cut up to them. It's stunning. Also lovely is a hike down the Ilhara Valley. I visit the underground city at Derinkuyu - amazing - the Christians built vast tunnel systems 8 floors below their village to hide from their enemies.
On my way south to Gaziantep, just 60km from Jaman's hometown of Aleppo, the landscape is epic and my soundtrack is perfect for it - Black Dice and Arvo Pärt. Özge, a friend of Tara's has kindly offered to host me and I like her instantly. She does some insanely cool NGO rehabilitation work with Syrians and is fun and just plain lovely. I head to Rumkale, a castle over a valley submerged for a hydroelectric scheme. Özge has set me the mission of retrieving a bottle of Raki that she left with a boat captain called Sali. The pretty ride turns into a very rough road and then peters out completely at the water. "Er, Özge, didn't you say there was a bridge?!" I WhatsApp. "Oh, I am always drunk when I go there" she replies... Of course there are 3 guys sitting there, at a table in the middle of Nowhere, Monty Python-style. They give me some rice and we entirely fail to communicate - I think they're Syrian - and yet the whole scenario is very smiley - my first real 'in-country' interaction of the trip and it rushes back to me how much I love these wordless meetings. The only word that works is when I point to the village, Halfeti, I want to get to, across the water and say "Sali". That prompts a phonecall and presently a boat appears to whisk me to the other side, to the accompaniment of deafening music. I have to leave the bike in the care of my new friends. What could possibly go wrong?

Sali takes me for a boat ride and I see a submerged village, just the minaret poking above the water. Back on the bike side of the water one of the guys is still there, Halukfuat is his name, and he plies me with Raki and tries to persuade me to stay, indicating an impossibly broken armchair on a rickety pontoon. I friend him on facebook and Sherife! (cheers!) I am off in the sunset.
Back in Antep, Özge has had the horrible news that her Syrian boyfriend's father has been locked up in one of Asaad's most notorious prisons. When I drop off the welcome therapy of the Raki to her bf's place, she tells me that they have just learned that his sister has visited his father and that he has been tortured for the last week and has sort-of lost his mind. I am of course lost for words.

In a daze I walk the hour into the old part of town and find a restaurant called İmam Çağdaş which turns out to be one of the best meals of my life - a yogurty meaty dish with aubergine called Ali Nazik followed by sublime baklava - Antep is rightly famous for its cusine.

I see Özge briefly for breakfast and she says that her bf's father now has a court date and may surprisingly get bail, in which case she is going to try to pull some strings with the British Council and get him to the UK.

On my way out town I visit the sumptuous Zeugma mozaic museum.
This is as near to Syria as I can get and, although I'm only a relatively short distance from Israel, now I have to turn back west all the way to Athens to get a boat there. The mediterranean coast is mostly an unsightly sprawl of package holiday hotels. I stay in Kızkalesi with its sweet little castle on an island a few hundred metres offshore in the bay. I wander the restaurants and choose the one where all the cops seem to be eating. As I linger over my Tavuk Çorbası and Lahmacun Antep, a little sweet truck pulls up and a bloke jumps out and starts weighing out hunks of baklava. The cops get very excited and buzz around him until he coughs up sticky bribes for them. Turns out the meal gives me food poisoning annoyingly and I spend the whole next day doing a 'Death in Venice' turn, unable to even leave the room and face the sunshine. The following day I swim out to the castle and back which washes away much of the residual evil. On the way back, another swimmer comes up to me shouting "Jalum! Jalum!" urgently but I can't figure out what he means. Hopefully not "Shark! Shark!" In any case I get back to dry land unbitten, cram all my bags inside bags inside boxes and head west.
I take myself out for a candlelit dinner in Side on the ancient ramparts of this pretty town, with the sea gently lulling my thoughts. I have been to so many romantic locations solo. I get the full tourist treatment and they try to add 25% on to the bill and then have the cheek to refuse to bring me my change saying 'but you're a rich man' - this from someone who owns a hotel and restaurant in the most prime location imaginable. I get fully angry and eventually get my money but just the sour aftertaste stops me sleeping that night.
The peninsula from Antalya to Ölüdeniz is the most beautiful scenery of the trip yet. Just after Kaş, on yet another heart-breakingly gorgeous spit of earth, lapped by layers of indescribable blues and greens, I get lunch from chatty Mohammed. He complains that, because of Erdoğan, his family's land, which is the most stunning piece of real estate you can imagine, is only worth 5 million - last year it was worth 10. US tourists are now being denied visas in a tit for tat spat.
Despite the amazing natural beauty that surrounds it, Ölüdeniz is one of the worst white trash tourist hellholes I have ever found. Everyone looks so ugly! Or maybe it's just the neon lighting. I find my friend Owen who is visiting from London and he borrows a tandem paraglider and takes me for the word-defying experience of a flight from the mountain Babadağ that towers over the bay. It's an unforgetable experience and also at times one of the more terrifying especially when Owen decides to do some aerobatics. I am shaking for a good 20 minutes after we land. Then we drink. Oh how we drink.
A spindly zippy road up the lushly forested Dalaman river valley takes me to Pamukkale. My guesthouse has curious sunken bath cubicles in the room. The water comes directly from the earth's core it would seem and in the time it takes me to go out and have a very slow dinner the bath cools down to the point where it still nearly blisters my skin. There is a local fountain, also fed from the hot springs that has sort of built itself from the thick orange carbonate deposit it leaves. It steams there in the middle of the square like a seething alien growth. At Pamukkale proper I wade through the travertine pools and admire the natural art that sweats out of the hills.
In Izmir I enjoy the Agora, displays of textiles and explanations of camel wrestling (!) At the port of Cesme, the guard asks me if I know the chicken and points at my ticket smiling knowingly. I don't follow recipes I grin back and on that note we call it a draw. I go the wrong way through passport control but no-one seems to mind and then, while I'm eating a pretzel at a cafe a laidback guy comes and asks my name and says I need to visit the customs but I can finish my pretzel first. I roll the bike onto the teeny ferry and it's goodbye Turkey - it was fun!
On Chios I go the wrong way through their immigration building, just for symmetry. Then I line up at the water's edge in the warm darkness for the ferry which arrives like a 5 storey Terry Gilliam nightmare complete with filling-loosening horn blast. On that cue everything goes nuts. Cars, people, trucks all randomly rushing in all directions on and off the boat simultaneously, there's even a guy in a wheelchair in the middle of the scrum. Various policemen and soldiers vainly blow whistles to no discernable effect and yet somehow nobody gets crushed or drowned.

A night in a seat with blaring basketball on the TV and every part of my body taking it in turns to go to sleep apart from my brain and then I am catapulted into the Athens predawn with a thousand fellow banshees and shoal through a primordial soup of rutted roads bearing Cyrillic signs without any real sense of being awake or asleep, barely existing in fact. I find a boutique hotel and Anna, the Polish attendant, shows me to the breakfast buffet which is so good it pulls me most of the way back up the well from the Bardo. I offer her the pillion seat on the condition she brings the entire buffet along. Thus fortified I drop my luggage and go get the bike reshod with more Africa-friendly tyres and stock up with some other spares as I know my next chance to be able to do this relatively easily will be Nairobi.

My hotel, the Lozzani, is a hilariously oldschool flophouse with junkies and prostitutes wandering around like Night of the Living Dead outside. At first the shower is amazing but then it abruptly takes its icy place in the great pantheon of evil-plumber-revenge-apparatus. I head out and spend a nice hour in hip Trigono with filmmaker Christos, best friend of Kostas who edited "Papagajka". The sunrise ride down to Lavrio port leads me into an impossible bluff that the cloud silhouettes make. A mountain with a hole in it.

The shipping office is an anonymous portacabin with an illegible sign. I realise I need to use my other passport on the paperwork and he makes the correction with a flourish of tippex. Then to customs - "you see that ruin over there? next to it there is a field and at the end of that field is a building and at the bottom of that building you can ask a man to stamp this piece of paper". All done by 9am. I take a bus to the airport and try to stay awake - signs say no sleeping - ironic in that my lasting memory of Athens airport is our whole family sleeping on its roof in 1974 when our flight was delayed.

On the flight, the guy siting on the aisle of my row is so immense that the flight attendant has to bring a seatbelt extension for him. I am in the window seat thankfully. A French guy comes to claim the middle seat. The big guy goes to stand but the French guy says with glazed eyes no hurry I will wait a few minutes - clearly needing a moment to steel himself. We pass over Lavrio and I can see the boat, Alexo, that my motorbike is shipping on - Bon Voyage bike!
In Tel Aviv it's hot and I am struggling under the weight of my outsize topbag and tankbag. The bike is supposed to carry these but it won't get to Haifa for another 3 days. And everything is written backwards in Hebrew. And my 3rd iPhone cable of the trip has broken. I manage to make it on the train and then the bus to my hostel with the dying 1% of the battery. I wander to Summit Gardens in Jaffa port to see a pretty cityscape and to feed icecream to a very pushy ginger cat. Tel Aviv is stressy. Everyone seems overcaffeinated but with a beachy LA veneer. The Museum of Arts is a welcome refuge - such a stunning building and great curation. Warhol photos, Louise Borgeois, some truly great video installations. Naftali Bezem, Yosi Bergner, Moshe Propes - all beguiling classic modern painting. I don't even get to the main building with its impressive list of impressionists. As with the rest of my time in Israel, soldiers are everywhere, young boys and girls touting automatic weapons like awkward shopping bags. I meet my friend Anna for a drink. I met her in Dharamsala and I remember her rigging up a little tightrope for fun on the roof of the guesthouse. Now she is an experienced aerialist and teaches at a circus school. Her car is deluged with various complicated-looking rigs.
I get a train to Caesarea and am met by my sister Karen's friend Ehud. She was here many years ago working on a Kibbutz with him. He takes me to their house in Pardes Hana and I meet his family. Their youngest two are 8 year-old twins. The girl chose to be vegan at the age of 3.5, the boy has cerebral palsy. Orly, Ehud's wife plies me with bean soup and I chat to Imba their 16 year-old son. I briefly meet Daniel their oldest home on leave from his military service. Ehud and I go to watch Pelicans which are stopping over in Israel at some nearby wetlands on their migration to Africa. They are massive - 3 metre wingspan. As we bounce along the rough tracks we see some Asian guys with their arms up to the shoulders in a creek - Ehud tells me they're illegally hunting wildlife and I hope it's not the otter we just saw. Later Orly gets her photos out from when she visited Ethiopia in the nineties and I promise to send a postcard when I get there myself. In the morning they juggle the twins and put the boy into special boots and then when we get to his school into a little electric jeep that he can drive himself. I would be so jealous of him at that age! Ehud tells me about his day - he is a clincal psychologist and will be assessing abused kids and then working at his clinic until 8pm. Lovely man. As is Orly, an Art-Therapist and talented artist.

I arrive on the train to the port city of Haifa at 9am and commence 6 straight hours of bureaucracy. At Rosenfeld shipping they have to go back to the boat to get the paperwork so I sit around waiting and chatting to Eyal, an Israeli fruit farmer who has just returned from motorbiking in Europe. I pay my 500 euros and lug my heavy bags down the road to the Pool insurance office. Just as well Eyal can show me where it is as the place is very anonymous and only signed in Hebrew. The woman there is very grumpy, probably because her two colleagues spend the 2 hours I am there constantly berating her, for what reason I cannot ascertain, she needs lots of photocopies, lots of signatures and even my International Driving Permit - the first time I have ever actually used this. In the end it costs 360 shekhels for two weeks which is actually a bit cheaper than they originally told me so that's a relief. Customs is fairly straight forward - he writes something down in Hebrew and says I need to ask the gate guard where it is - and I struggle on in the heat under my vertebrae-crushing load to "Customs Gate 5" which turns out to be right next to Rosenfeld shipping - I could have just left my bag here... D'oh! This is particuarly on my mind when the security guards there subject me to the most thorough search I have ever experienced - every little bag and object is scrutinised down to squeezing my toothpaste - takes almost an hour. And they have no idea where the thing on the note is that the customs guy gave me. Miraculously I find a rusty old luggage trolley and wheel my way around the building asking random people and showing them the note. Eventually I show a teenage boy and he disappears into a toilet and comes back with an older man who looks at my note and asks me "what do you want to do?" This is the 5th time someone here has asked me this and they seem mystified when I say I want to collect a shipment. IT'S A PORT!! But anyway, he takes me in a lift to a nice air-conditioned office where a nice lady called Adi tells me their computers are down and can I please use this terminal here - she comes over to help me with the Hebrew and I ask her about the button in the corner that says "English" She looks genuinely shocked and says "Well I never saw that!" So I do the form myself and pay the port fee of 300 shekhels. Then after another hour of waiting I get a form, comically laden with stamps and she gives me directions as to where to claim my bike. Oh just keep walking that way and if you get to a second roundabout you've gone too far. So off I trudge. It's about a twenty minute walk and my trolley has disappeared. Row upon row of shiney new trucks and tractors and cars. Past "Alexo" sitting sated at its dock. and there suddenly is my bike incarcerated behind a chain link fence. I bargain for its release with a cheery guy who claims all my documents and hands me my key. Then of course I go out the wrong exit and some very unimpressed guards send me back through the truck channel. Of course the window is about 3 metres above me at the gate and the guard here has to go through a pantomime of running up and down to and from his office about 8 times with the truck drivers behind me getting stonily irate but finally I am free. I have arrived in the Middle East!

The Baha'i gardens in Haifa are OK if you like OCD horticulture on a large scale but it is interesting to hear about the Baha'i religion. Akko, just the other side of the bay, is more my cup of tea with its worn old Arabic port streets and souq teeming with feral cats.
Then on to Kamon to meet Ronen who is a biker connection and a ball of energy. Efe his wife serves up mint tea, nuts, carrot and tries to curb Ronen's enthusiasm. When he says we should start at 7.30am she says 'you're not in the army!' but I'm happy to go with the flow. Rike, a work colleague comes in the morning. I ask them about work - I know Ronen designs weapons but he says they don't talk about those things. We zoom off to the Sea of Galilee at which point Rike, who has been riding behind me says my rear sprocket is wobbling - probably the bearings we decide. But OK to ride on for the moment. So we zip up to the chilly Golan heights and gaze down from the gun emplacements at Merom Golan to the blasted Syrian city of Al Qunaitra - you can see where they have rebuilt the town a couple of kilometres further away. An audio guide relates the story of the Yom Kippur war in 1973 when the Israelis repelled the Syrian invasion. It's all backed with a stirring patriotic version of Dvorak's 'New World' symphony and goes on to talk about the renewable energy projects in the area. It finishes by saying "Israel, keeping the Golan Heights clean". It's not clear if they are referring to Arabs or carbon emissions. We have a lovely lunch of Sambusac, a sort of Calzone with Za'atar (spice mix) and Labneh (cheese) in the town of Horfaish then on to Rosh Ha-Niqra - the border with Lebanon. A guy called David asks directions. He's from Cape Town and when I explain my trip to him he offers me his place to stay. How bizarre to think a year from now I will take him up on that! We wander the grottoes and see the old British Railway line that linked Beirut and Tel Aviv back under the British Mandate.
Back in Kamon, Ronen shows me the 3D printer he is building from scratch. Fascinating.

Next day, he lets me stay in his workshop and fix my sprocket bearing and number plate. Such a godsend to have the opportunity at this point. He even helps me look up what size bearing I need and takes me to the nearby town of Karmiel to a hardware store to buy it. It's more a cathedral of hardware and the owner is like the pope of all hardware store clerks. He is 93 and finds the exact thing we need from his vast array of shelves in about 30 seconds. Ronen drops me back at the house and then goes to his work at its secret location and I message him periodically when I can't find a tool etc. The job involves using a heat gun which is a first for me but I take my time and am proud of myself when I manage to do it successfully. I also cut a piece of aluminium to back my numberplate.
Now it's getting a bit late for my journey to Jerusalem but I have itchy feet so I head off. I am a bit nervous as I have decided to take the route through the West Bank. The driving gets a bit more homicidal after the checkpoint and the affluence drops by about 90% but apart from that it is straightforward and I get to Abraham hostel by about 7pm. Out for a tasty Ethiopian - the Ethiopian beer "Raya" is good too.

After a Nutella-heavy breakfast scrum at the hostel, I wander the Machane Yehudah Market and the surrounding streets of Nahla'ot.Then I take a tour of the old city. Jerusalem means "city of peace" and yet it has been conquered more times than any other city on earth, 33 times in fact.

We visit the Armenian quarter - they have their own quarter because they were the first nation to convert to Christianity. Their flag shows the mountain they hold sacred - Ararat. Turkey apparently complained to the UN that the mountain is in their territory and the UN responded that the Turkish flag also depicts objects not in Turkish territory - a crescent moon and a star.

The Jewish quarter was completely destroyed by Jordan and remained empty for 18 years - so archaeologists got a chance to explore and found a wealth of Roman streets below.

Then there is the view of the Dome of the Rock - where Mohammed ascended to Heaven - or if you're Christian or Jewish, what God made the earth from. The wailing wall is the nearest they can get to the first temple - built by Solomon.

The Muslim quarter is bustling with tradersIn the Christian Quarter there is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. I love the fact that a ladder is propped against a first floor window. This is because the church is shared between several branches of Christianity and they could never agree on anything. So at one point they decided to freeze the way everything was organised. When this was done there happened to be this ladder left there by a workman and so it also had to stay in perpetuity.

They could never agree who should hold the keys so they ended up giving them to a Muslim family whose descendants to this day still open the church every morning.

Inside the church is anything but a place of calm contemplation. It's more like being on a Channel Ferry when everyone is told to return to their cars.
Down the hill in Jericho, it is much warmer and I walk into town which suddenly feels way more edgy and adventurous than outside the West Bank. The Israeli parts are great but the culture feels very first world and like a European outpost. Here it feels like the real Middle East in all its chaotic messy glory.

I settle into a Shawarma place called Jericho Cafe and after a while I get talking to a guy called Hassan. When I say talking, what we actually do is converse entirely with google translate on own respective phones. It is kind of amazing that I can type in English and then have it spit out some beautiful Arabic script. That, along with lots of gestures and expressions, keeps us chatting for the next couple of hours. It's pretty odd some of the translations that I get in English from Hassan mind you and it leads to some odd moments. At one point I think he has told me that he lives with an unmarried pregnant woman and when I ask when the little darling is expected, he looks positively freaked-out and waves his hands - "under Islam this is... merciful!" No "...butchering" no "...Haram!" the translator finally says. I try to imagine myself in my alcohol-free, sex-free, tobacco-free coca cola free teens and somewhere deep in my brain a fuse blows. I'm not entirely sure if his work as a tax accountant grants him a chauffeur or if he is a lorry driver but the niceties of language notwithstanding we have a fun evening and arrange to meet tomorrow afternoon. We talk about money and he explains how expensive things are here because of the occupation and the import duties imposed by the Israelis.

On the way home people still call out welcome every 15 yards. It's late and one guy steps out of his car to indicate his house and offer me food and a bed.

I sleep pretty well considering the insane cockerel. Well they're all insane aren't they, or at least they look like they're having a fit when they crow. This one however starts crowing before midnight and doesn't let up even at dawn. He's still going at 9am. It must be some sort of record. Or deathwish. Basel at the Auberg Inn where I'm staying, serves up a delicious breakfast of hummus, labneh, cucumber, bell peppers, tomatoes, fried egg, pitta, halva and marmalade with coffee and watermelon for after.

I have to fix the throttle on the bike which is sticking - upon closer inspection I can see that the handguard is bent and that is pushing against the throttle - must be from one of the falls. On the one hand it means I can ride no-handed, other other it is potentially very dangerous if I weren't able to shut it off. I go find a workshop in a crumbling backyard and he quickly bends it back into shape with the addition of a washer it's as good as new. I go to the ruins of Hisham's Palace which has a lovely mosaic. The guard, About, gets my phone number and invites me to dinner at his house and then I head on to the Monastery of Temptation where Christ was tempted by the devil while he fasted for 40 days and nights. It's a dramatic setting, high in a rock face and the journey there up some very steep gravel switchbacks nearly topples me a couple of times especially since I am carrying my full luggage but it makes the view, when I attain it, all the more epic.

I meet Hassan back at the Jericho Cafe and we head off to the Dead Sea. "Salty" he tells me helpfully. "Don't get it in your eyes" he says, somewhat more helpfully. It really is an odd experience - as you get deep enough, up to your armpits, your legs suddenly refuse to stay on the sand and pop up either in front or behind you. I slather myself with mud - it's supposed to be good for your skin. The effect is has on me is that my iPhone won't recognise my fingerprint for 2 days.
I head to Sami's Hostel, which is in the Aqbat Jaber refugee camp. Bit tricky to find as the location on maps.me is wrong and I drive into someone's driveway where several people are praying. "Is this Sami's hostel?" I ask tentatively "Out!" they say and we all laugh. When I finally find Sami's I am introduced to Kseniya, a Russian girl with a shaved head who I am sharing a room with. She's very nice, into meditation and fasting and offers me a place to stay in Dahab, Sinai. In the night the Call to Prayer, from the adjacent Mosque is so exquisitely loud and clear that I can't stop myself getting out my recorder and grabbing it. Not like there's any chance of sleeping through it anyway. Surprised to note that this is a prerecording - there's very obvious electronic echo added to it and at the end there's a sort of telephone tone noise to signify the end. Lazy Imams.

In the morning Kseniya talks about the benefits of fasting and the focus it produces in the mind. I suddenly feel very hungry and go across the street and get falafels. I have a nice chat with the falafel master Mustafa and his friend Hamse the baker from next door. Mustafa shows me photos of the camp from before 1948 with beautiful old traditional buildings. Over time it has become a place for non-refugees to find cheap land and so the building is pretty chaotic and gives rise to the ramshackle jungle I see today. I take Kseniya to Old Jericho (Tel el-Sultan) which is just a few mounds of earth really. But there are a few tantalising glimpses of parts of a huge tower and the place pulsates with all the layers of history - right back to Neolithic and pre-pottery times - it's the oldest town on earth after all. We stop at the "Russian Museum" which we have been joking about - what possible connection could there be between Jericho and Russia?! It must be a KGB front. Turns out it is a piece of land bought by the Russian state to build a church on but on which was then discovered Byzantine remains. We take pictures of the unlikely combo of a Russian girl in Indian clothes with no hair sitting on a British motorbike outside a Russian museum in Palestine.

I head off in search of "Nabi Musa" - a mosque built on the burial site of Moses. This takes me out into real desert and past abandoned Israeli tanks and cars used for target practice.

I also find Qasr al Yahub - the place where John the Baptist baptised Jesus. It's on the River Jordan which is of course the border between the two countries so you have to go through a maze of minefields and razor wire to get there but when you do you find gaggles of white-smocked Russian ladies being dunked by chanting orthodox priests with both country's soldiers eyeing each other uneasily across the narrow stream.

I head back up to sea level and beyond to Marda and find Murad who runs a permaculture farm and an olive farm. He is a pretty militant Palestinian and of course I arrive on the 100 year anniversary of the Balfour Declaration under which Britain said it would support the Jews to have a homeland. This has of course caused one or two wrinkles for the people in this area and I give Murad an unreserved apology for my idiot Prime Minister who claims to be proud of this and who is of course trying to curry favour with that utter moron in the White House. Murad is another fast-talking ball of energy and juggles calls with Lush amongst others. The olives we pick tomorrow will go to make soap for them which is the closing of a circle for me as Lush very kindly donated 25 kilos of soap to "Papagajka".

In the morning, after picking some tomatoes, we breakfast on fried cauliflower, scrambled egg, falafels, labneh, tomatoes and Za'atar. Murad and Judy, a 65 year-old Australian who has been coming here twice a year for 10 years bicker like an old married couple. Then we go to the olive farm and pick all day. It's a very Zen task and involves me climbing the hospitable trees that Murad's grandmother planted and the time passes quickly. We manage to denude 3 trees between the three of us and have two sacks for a total of about 75kg of olives. That's about 15 litres of Olive oil.

A lady that Judy knows well comes by with gifts for her daughter that Judy will take to the US for her. They include wrist covers, a herbal stick to clean teeth with and a box of sweets that also say 'hair removal' on them. I talk about going to Hebron and Murad warns me not to go alone as he says they will think I am a settler and attack me. Better to go with an organised tour he says.
I ride into Nablus and wander the old town. Nablus is known to be a hotbed of Palestinian resistance and I am a little nervous. I stop at a shop selling live chickens and a guy there gets a little aggressive about the Balfour declaration when I tell him I am English. He soon becomes friendly when I explain that I am no supporter of Theresa May. I end up apologising for her and my country's arrogance 100 years ago several times over the next few hours.

As I wander the drop-dead gorgeous crumbling old biblical town I get a mixture of dirty looks and some friendly welcomes. Although it feels edgy, I am also loving the sense of immersion. The walls are peppered with pictures of martyrs and machine-gun wielding youths. A Coffee grinder, Sami, welcomes me and plies me with delicious coffee and chocolate. He talks about Islam and how Christ talked of Mohammed and how we are all one. The guy sitting next to me helps me with some Arabic phrases and I find out that he lost his son in a Police cell 'accident' I get some of the cheesey sweet local delicacy Kunafeh which is very more-ish and the vendor won't take money for it. I talk to Naser Alniadi who ran a fashion and beauty shop in New Orleans for a while. I become facebook friends with all and sundry.
I go to Kennedy Memorial near Jerusalem at dusk to meet one of Anna's circus friends, Shay. In the firey glow of a heart-breaking sunset, accompanied by the calls of jackals, he tells me how he used to be a combat medic and had one of his company die in his arms after a suicide attempt. How he had to relieve a captain of his command at gunpoint when he went mad. How his girlfriend was stabbed to death by a terrorist and how two years later his wife and mother of his daughter was killed in a bus bombing along with 21 other people. After this he decided to devote his life to creativity and became a circus performer, wielding fire sticks. He is very much PTSD and medicated accordingly and yet another of the balls of energy I have met in this complicated country. He bemoans the fact that he as an Israeli is not allowed to go into the West Bank "for his own protection" He says it's a conspiracy to keep the two peoples apart who always used to coexist without problems. He tells me the history and myths of the area. He's a batshit crazy lovely man.

I find myself listening a lot in this country. On the whole trip actually. Certainly the people of the Middle East need some listening to and Israel/The West Bank/The Occupied Territories/Sector 48/The Holy Land more than most. Maybe it untwists things. In the circular way of things, it is also somehow part of my own therapy - I survived open heart surgery just 6 months ago and a broken heart of a more allegorical kind the year before. It leaves me wanting to just breathe the world in.

It's late, I am slightly tipsy but I head back into the West Bank with no address for my lodging and my petrol tank perilously low. I have to ask about 5 different people for directions but they are all amazingly smiley and I wash up at my airbnb no problem. Next day I visit Shepherds fields - where the angels came down to tell the shepherds about the wise men and then the Church of the Nativity. The whole interior is a mass of scaffolding and the queue to see the spot where Jesus was born is absurdly long so I don't tarry. Then the Church of the Milk Grotto - not very interesting either. Then to the separation wall. The art and stories on the wall are very touching - I am always moved by art as a reaction to the artless. And Banksy's "Walled-Off" Hotel has a special potency with his new inscription for the Balfour Declaration centenary.
The family I am staying with say Hebron will be fine on my own so I take a deep breath and head there. I pass through the weirdly manicured lawns of a settlement and then am spat out into a rundown Palestinian area, presenting my passport to machine-gun wielding teenagers at every turn.

After I look around the Jewish part of the Cave of Abraham - where all the Jewish forefathers are buried - I am approached by Mohammed who offers me a tour that is a joint Israeli-Palestinian project. Turns out to be entirely from the Palestinian perspective but it fascinating nonetheless. He shows me the deserted streets around the Cave of Abraham with their shutters welded shut and tells me how Israelis throw stones at Palestinian homes so they had to put grilles on the windows. He shows me the school he went to and tells me how the kids have to get there an hour early just to get through all the security. It looks like a prison. There is a Palestinian house that an Israeli flag is draped over. He says the family took down the flag but the soldiers threatened to arrest them if they didn't put it back. He shows me an alley that the soldiers walled off. Some people took a shortcut through a nearby window and when they were caught were put in prison for 2 weeks. There is a mass of steel welded over the window now. When I go to pay him the 50 shekhels we agreed he conveniently has no change for my 100 note and says don't I want to make a donation to Palestine? Well OK... A cardinal rule of travel - small denominations!
I add Mohammed to my long list of Palestinian facebook friends and enter the Muslim side of the Cave of Abraham. This beautiful mosque, complete with the tombs of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah was where Baruch Goldstein, an Jewish doctor from Brooklyn came on February 25, 1994 with his M16 rifle and killed 29 Muslims, wounding 125 more. They would mostly have been shot in the back while praying. When he ran out of bullets, the door he thought would be open turned out to be unlocked so he couldn't run away and was beaten to death by survivors. His grave, not far away, is now a site of pilgrimage for Jewish extremists. Although the Israeli government dismantled the shrine to some extent in 1999, his gravestone with inscriptions calling him a hero was left untouched. After this, Israelis have been prevented by their own army from entering many areas in the West Bank - you see great big red signs saying that the area is dangerous (to Israelis, not to Palestinians who were the victims in this case) on the approaches to many Palestinian areas such as Nablus and Bethlehem - and much of the apartheid that I have seen was brought to its current state. I shake the Imam's hand and listen to him singing to his congregation.
The souq is a wonderous rabbit warren - with netting above to catch the rubbish that settlers drop onto their Palestinian neighbours - and I eat a falafel at a busy place, mesmerised by the guy whose job it is to constantly scoop the falafels with a special mould and dump them in the oil - he doesn't stop producing the little balls of goodness for the whole half an hour I am there and I imagine he continues to scoop in his sleep. The souq opens out into a blaring mental Arab town with everything hurtling in all directions. I try and fail to find one of the famous glass factories and head through another checkpoint - holding my passport up to the filthy window - and suddenly it's like someone pressed mute and I am in a ghost town area for Jews. Mohammed told me that many settlers just have a second home in the west bank and mostly live in Tel Aviv - I don't know how true that is but certainly the settlements I saw seem very sparsely populated.

I find the Jewish Visitors Centre and the lady there gives me the settlers perspective. First she sits me down in a state of the art cinema with the surround audio going through a test intoning "rear left, front right, centre..." Then I am shown the most appallingly vomitous film about the history of the Jewish people complete with comically bad dubbing, cringe-inducing acting and zoom-whoosh video effects. At one point a machine actually blows soap bubbles in my face. It's laughable but the point, as reinforced by the lady on her tour after, is that at various points the Jews bought parts of Palestine - Abraham paid 400 pieces of silver to own his tomb etc. - and also were subjected to massacres and persecution over the millennia. She says the Jews were here before the Arabs. My guess would be that the truth is a lot more cloudy. Yes the area was called Judea before Caesar started calling it Palestine around the time of Christ. Yes they have emotive and ancient claims on the land, but so do the Palestinians and they both need to accept at least to some extent the status quo and find compromise. People are not responsible for the sins or successes of their antecedents. But I'm saying that from my position of lofty privilege of course... Settlements are certainly not helping - neither is any form of violence.
It's starting to get dark and I am anxious to be gone from this semi war-zone. I swoop down to the Arad plateau in the gathering dusk through stark desert shapes and find Meir, an old-school wisecracking Israeli as my Airbnb host in this cookie-cutter American-style town. I drink Guinness and watch the premier league in the 'pub' and endure the wails of the worlds most unhappy baby from the next table. Who needs contraceptives? Back at Meir's immaculate home, I endure the yapping of the worlds most unhappy dog until I finally pass out. Next day I go to the Mall for supplies for a trip to the desert. Shay was warning me of "Bad-doins" (Bedouin) and animals and says I must be sure to light a fire. I take in epic views on my detour down to the Dead Sea. The sea is divided into giant evaporation tanks here and there is a fair bit of industry, including an enormous magnesium factory. There is even a tourist viewpoint to see the factory.
But today is all about the Nabateans, Nomads who ran the incense route from Yemen to the Mediterranean and built settlements across the Negev desert here. Shortly before Christ came along the Romans muscled in on their trade and then later they settled into towns and converted to Christianity, as evidenced by the churches at the various sites I visit - Mamshit, Shivta, Avdat. The atmospheric ruins are all set against the trance-inducing backdrop of the desert sculpted by wind and the receding ocean that once covered the Jordan valley.
At Shivta, after several army camps packed with rows of tanks, I find a camping spot in a grove of trees. It's beautifully desolate but I do find one companion for the evening, Danny, who is Israeli and has been travelling around Israel for seven years having 'lost his confidence'. He has a big bushy grey beard. We build a fire and he tells me stories of his family - fled Cossack Pogroms of the early 20th century to Alexandria. There they spoke Yiddish with their parents, French between the children and Arabic around town. I explain how English is partly related to old Gothic German and he says maybe that's why he finds he knows some English words but doesn't know how - Yiddish is also related to old German.

In the background the whooshes, pops and thumps of the Israeli army shooting and zipping around in F16s and the high-pitched cries of Jackals out in the sandy wastes.

I ride to Avdat where the ruins are ruined by yelling schoolkids and then on to Mitzpe Ramon, on the edge of a vast crater or Makhtesh created as the ocean waters receded, several miles across. I ride the dramatic twisty route down into it and then the harsh gravel roads to Wadi Ramon admiring the layered colourful sand formations. I hike around a horseshoe-shaped canyon called Ein Saharanini and have the place entirely to my self, feeling most serene as I wander past the natural abstract art installations.
On down to Eilat, a beach and border town on the snippet of Red Sea that is Israeli. I check-in to "The Shelter" with a fresh-faced Canadian called Jessie who hands me a bible and reminds me that the bible study group is at 11am. So that's why this place is cheap. Note to self: Read the website more carefully next time! I say I will be gone by 11am (Phew!). As I am washing my clothes in an outside sink, a lady from Heidelberg says she hopes my journey is full of angels (Help! I've been captured by the Christians!) My roommate Manfred tells me about his Filipina wife - "of course she was a Catholic and they don't live the way God told us too..." and he talks about how much they prayed when she kept failing her German citizenship test and how the owner of the hostel is a "Believer" (HELP!!!) He buys me a beer, which we have to go out of the hostel to drink, and tells me how he used to be in a band that were like Deep Purple. They got big in Malaysia after he left. He used to collect sick bags from airplanes and once sold one for $200. Before that he collected telephone directories and his prize possession was one from Havana "Most of the people who live there don't even have one" he says. And he doesn't like Arabs. They smile but they lie he says.

At the Jordanian border I have a nice friendly Israeli soldier at the first gate. She smiles and wishes me luck. Then to balance things out, I have the most miserable and hostile passport officer I have ever encountered - she all but spits on my passport. Then I switch passports and head to the Jordanian side. There a crowd of soldiers huddle around the bike and ask me all the usual questions and generally treat me like I have just scored a winning goal. After everything is meticulously X-rayed, I enter the world of the numbered doors. First I am sent to door number 8 with strict instructions to then go on to number 10 but number 8 sends me to number 4 and says I should follow that with number 9. However number 9 is closed so number 10 leans out and says I need to go to number 1. Number 1 is chain-smoking with a deathwish but ironically sends me to get insurance. In the insurance room, he has a worried expression. The network is down which means he spends the next 2 hours slowly typing I know not what while making a string of phonecalls. A random bloke comes from nowhere to change my shekhels into Dinars and translates with the worried man for me until my 27 Dinars is paid. Then back to the Advent Calendar doors. Number 4 has a big queue but eventually and dejectedly prints me out a fabulous-looking embossed document. I pay him 20 Dinars for this with a 1 Dinar afterthought gouge. A soldier takes me to a secret un-numbered cabin behind the numbered ones where they produce a credit card machine with a flourish. All the cabins have three large portraits of the king, his father and his son all beaming down on their officials. This soldier proudly poses for a photo with me in front of the portraits. Back to number 1 who sends me to number 8. Now number 8, is the chief and he knows it. He looks like an Arabic Harrison Ford as he brushes the ash of my embossings and grunts in satisfaction - he has found a mistake! Number 1 has missed off a digit from my numberplate. So I stroll back to number 1. Number 1 looks mournfully at the space where the "9" should be and issues a new corrected document. Then just back to number 8 and I am done. Numbers 10, 9 and 4 all come out of their doors to congratulate me on cracking the code. I am free! Just two more checkpoints and I finally enter Jordan. Almost immediately, a land cruiser tries to run me off the road but I am ready for him. Not my first crazy-driver country Bucko!