Elizabeth Weir

Weir travels

Elizabeth Weir

I decided in early 2006 that I'd had enough of the London rat-race and the career thing - at least, for the time being - and that I'd like to take some time out: "me time", as it were; time to do at least some of the things that I'd been thinking about doing over the last few years but hadn't been able to fit in around work and client demands.

So here I am: backpack to the ready (to be honest, it had never really been put away after my '93-'94 round-the-world trip), and a gazillion ideas about how to fill the next xx months..... (And, no, I've no idea when I'll go back to the "real" world, nor what I'd do if/when I get back there. Time enough to figure that one out, I reckon.)

Being an about-to-be-former technology lawyer, I thought I'd better join the 21st century and save you all the trouble of deciphering my handwriting (not to mention saving myself the hassle of writing postcards and negotiating the purchase of stamps). So, if you're interested in what I get up to (edited highlights only, you'll be relieved to hear), do read on....

And I'm still going strong a dozen or so years' later. Although my peregrinations are now occasionally interrupted by travel-fund-generating activities back at short-lived coalfaces in the UK, travel remains "my thing". Those itchy feet just refuse to be cured.

“Armenian soul knows no defeat”

Asia » Armenia October 27th 2023

Mt Ararat, dominating the Yerevan skyline from Turkey

Weir travels

“Nowadays, to climb Mount Ararat” – “OUR mountain,” she didn’t need to say; it’s on the Armenian national emblem – “we have to drive through Georgia and ask Turkey for permission!” Anna sat down, the acid in her words almost palpable around the tour bus. The border with Turkey has remained closed for over a hundred years. Earlier she’d pointed to the current border, a barbed-wire lined road below us, the no-man’s land beyond farmed by Armenians with special permission. “You see those houses over there? They’re in Turkey. They belong to Kurds. They used to belong to Armenian people. Until the genocide. Then the Turkish government gave them to the Kurds.” The genocide is understandably an open wound here, the more painful because of the international community’s failure comprehensively to recognise the extermination and deportation ... read more

the Armenian empire at its most extensive

Pakistan - behind the headlines: (3) Celebrating Chaumos

Asia » Pakistan » Khyber Pakhtunkhwa December 24th 2022

dressed to the nines

Weir travels

Celebrate a festival with a little-known pagan tribe in distant mountains? What an opportunity! The chance to spend Chaumos with the Kalash people in northwest Pakistan had been the real draw of this trip. Our tour company, Wild Frontiers, has a particular connection with the Kalash. Its founder, Jonny Bealby, had stayed with them for several months at the end of his mid-1990s journey from Peshawar through Nuristan in search of Kipling’s “Kafiristan”. Wild Frontiers had been the result of discussions with his host as to how others could experience the incredible hospitality of the Kalash, and Jonny himself continues to visit regularly. We were welcomed like family, and Lucy, who works for WF (though she was on this trip in a personal capacity), was peppered with questions about her boss from both sides, co-travellers and ... read more

Pakistan - behind the headlines: (2) Gandhara

Asia » Pakistan December 23rd 2022

viewpoint at Chakdara, the entrance to the Swat Valley

Weir travels

In Islamabad I found the best group of travel companions. Largely British, with a couple of Americans, we ranged in age from about 40 to 68. Our heritage included Canada, Taiwan, the Philippines and, appropriately enough, Pakistan. In work experience, we covered the management of wrestling, foreign aid, tourism, IT, construction, accountancy and the law. We could talk about hanging out with bonobos in the DRC, collecting elephant dung, living in Kabul, and a truly phenomenal array of trivia about music and 1970s British television. Unlike the Oman trip, we didn’t sit down and work out how few countries, between us, we had not visited, but it would have been a similarly impressively low number. Somewhat perversely, our itinerary in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan ignored the country’s official religion. Instead, we focussed on two others ... read more

Pakistan – behind the headlines: (1) Lahore

Asia » Pakistan » Lahore December 22nd 2022

Shalimar Gardens

Weir travels

It’s not on everyone’s travel list. In the West, the word alone conjures up images of military coups and political assassinations – Benazir Bhutto’s may be the most recent and most famous, but Pakistan’s been at this since it was four years old. Then there’s Abbottabad, the last refuge of Osama bin Laden; support for the Afghan Taliban; the on/off nuclear standoff with India; the ongoing dispute over Kashmir. And it wasn’t really on my list either until I met Barb in Oman a few years’ ago and heard tales of her month-long trip there earlier that autumn. Until I saw her pictures. “Spiky mountains,” said my brother dismissively, pushing me for a reason for my latest trip. “Haven’t you had your fill of spiky mountains?” Clearly not. On my return, there were the usual questions, ... read more

Lahore Fort and Hazuri Bagh from Badshahi Mosque

I love a sunburnt country…

Oceania » Australia » New South Wales » Broken Hill February 5th 2020

Australia's icons

Weir travels

I’ve been coming to this particular remote corner of New South Wales for over ten years, and I don’t think I’ve ever really given it the blog-space it deserves. And so, please meet Fowler’s Gap, the Arid Zone Research Station run by Sydney’s University of New South Wales. 100,000 acres of not very much at all, and I love it. To someone living most of the year on a cosy overcrowded little island, the prospect of flying for almost three hours and still not leaving the state in which you started is a little mind-blowing. Such is the flight from Sydney to Broken Hill, the self-proclaimed gateway to the Australian Outback. From there, the station is another 110 km up the road. I joke back home that running out of milk here necessitates a three-hour round ... read more

In (one or two of) Thesiger’s footsteps – part III

Middle East » Oman » Dhofar December 6th 2019

hypnotising

Weir travels

“I was exhilarated by the sense of space, the silence, and the crisp cleanness of the sand.” Thesiger put it in a nutshell. Sometimes, I find, the places that have the deepest impact are the hardest to describe. The next morning, I stood at the top of the smallish (75m/250ft) dune behind our first night’s camp in Rub’ Al Khali and tried to grasp the fact that this stunning, terrifying, hypnotising, incredible landscape continued in front of me for another 500km (310 miles), and stretched the same distance to either side of me. Even today, all of the Empty Quarter crossings made by non-resident explorers can be summarised in little more than a single screen of a Wikipedia entry, and, even now, all the technology in the world cannot insulate the visitor from its dangers. We ... read more

sunset through the frankinsense trees, Salalah

patterns made by the different colours of sand

view from my tent, first Empty Quarter campsite

In (one or two of) Thesiger’s footsteps – part II

Middle East » Oman December 5th 2019

sunset silhouettes, Al Khaluf dunes

Weir travels

We had stopped in Sinaw earlier in the day, primarily so Nawaf, Ahmed and Idris could shop for the next few days’ provisions. Sinaw has the raw-ness of a border town, which in a sense it is. It is here that the Bedouin come to trade their camels, stock up on modern amenities, and sell their crafts to the few tourists who make it this far. Sadly, it wasn’t camel-market day when we were there, though there was a solitary animal “parked” by the near-empty arena, cheek-by-jowl with somewhat less photogenic 4WDs. Wandering around the main souq, we encountered Bedouin women wearing a variety of burqas – not here the mesh-faced, body-covering sky-blue garment of Afghanistan, but a form of face mask, originally designed in pre-Islamic times for sun and sand protection. I’d first seen them ... read more

In (one or two of) Thesiger’s footsteps – part I

Middle East » Oman December 4th 2019

Burkit Al Mouz

Weir travels

The Economist’s front cover this week shows the Earth with a shop sign hanging over it: “CLOSED”. In this bizarre new world of daily, or more-than-daily, new restrictions on our movements, wherever we live, it seems odd that, a month ago, we could travel with near-abandon. And so I’m trying to go back to those days, to recreate that sense of freedom, even if the mind-leap from today’s discombobulation and shrunken horizons seems huge. When I booked to go to Mongolia in 2007, my mother was incredulous. What was the appeal of a country that gives its name to remoteness? “Because it’s full of emptiness.” “Why don’t you go to Canada?” she countered. Don’t get me wrong – I’d love to go to Canada; it’s very much “on the list”, but that’s not the point. Deserts ... read more

The Norway of Arabia

Middle East » Oman » Musandam Peninsula November 13th 2019

poster child for the Musandam: Khor Najd

Weir travels

Squint hard at a map of the Arabian Peninsula and you’ll see, towards its eastern end, a triangular spike of land that appears to be trying to prod Iran. A good political map of the area will show that the very tip of this spike, guarding the Straits of Hormuz, is a different colour from the rest. This is the Omani exclave of the Musandam Peninsula, entirely surrounded on the land side by the United Arab Emirates. Here the Hajar Mountains, the spectacular backdrop to Muscat and the cities of the Batinah plain along Oman’s northeastern coast, finally win the day, crashing dramatically into the ocean, allowing man only the occasional narrow valley for his habitation. Flying over the Peninsula, I was staggered that anyone has even bothered trying to fashion a living here in these ... read more

It wasn’t supposed to be like this… the first few days in Oman

Middle East » Oman November 7th 2019

if you're going to be ill, have a room with a view

Weir travels

I wasn’t supposed to get ill on day 1. (It’s now day 12 so you can rest assured I made a speedy recovery.) Thursday’s bus/ferry combo to Khasab on the Musandam Peninsula wasn’t supposed to be full. Plan B, Thursday’s flight to Khasab wasn’t supposed to be full (and the next day’s flight, come to that). I could see the men standing around the travel agent’s desk scratching their heads – what on earth was going on in that distant part of the Sultanate this weekend? And knights in shining armour aren’t supposed to appear in white dishdasha and embroidered kuma in a Mutrah travel agency and wave their magic wands while driving to pick up their kids from school. But that was Muneer. It wasn’t exactly clear why he was in the travel agency that ... read more

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