Myths & Realities of a Private Island in the Seychelles

The sand I’m standing on is soft and bleached, the type that squeaks beneath your soles if you walk too fast. The type that snuggles between your toes and presses footprints across the beach, then scatters footprints across the wooden floors inside.

It’s the type of sand that makes a private island.

We’re 230 kilometres from the mainland here on Desroches, afloat in the Indian Ocean somewhere south of the horn of Africa. And the mainland I just mentioned is less than 60 square miles.

The horizon holds nothing but air and water. And we’re standing only on sand.

“There’s no land underneath,” says Aurelieu Nahaboo, his eyes scanning the undergrowth. “And there hasn’t been for years. The volcano erupted 80 to 100 million years ago.”

I glance around. No obvious volcano.

“Through sinking and erosion, the silting up of sand…” he pauses to separate the casuarina leaves, “the Island of Desroches appeared.”

I scrunch sand with the arches of my feet. He looks out to sea.

“The reef around the island? That’s the rim of the crater.”

Technically, then, I’m standing inside a volcano.

The Myths of a Private Island in the Seychelles

Desroches Island, like most of the Seychelles, is a land of a thousand fantasies. Of deserted islands and sun-smooched beaches, palm fronds, white sand and clear water. Tales of sharks, pirates, lost princesses and exotic plants that no-one else has ever seen.

And they’re partly true, of course. The beaches are brochure-buff and Wills & Kate did stay here, albeit before she became a princess.

“And the sharks?”

“There aren’t any,” replied every single one of the people I met on this six kilometre long island. And to be fair, on Desroches, there aren’t. Yet in the summer of 2011, the Seychelles suffered two fatalities at the jaws of shark teeth, breaking a safety record that had been blemish-free for nearly 50 years. And sharks, as Aurelieu pointed out, can swim. Up to 45 miles a day.

I check a few stats in my head and keep my feet where I can see them.*

Technically, then, I’m standing inside a volcano.

As for the pirates, I’m more reassured. While Somalia looks uncomfortably close to the Seychelles on the lovely spinning globe that sits on my desk, in reality it’s over a thousand miles away. Distance is given a helping hand by updates from the American military, ensuring that unauthorised vessels stay far from the Seychellois island chain.

So that just leaves exotic vegetation. Coco de Mer, the voluptuous giant fruit with the sophisticated name and the saucy bulging shape does exist, it does live in the Seychelles but, alas, not on Desroches.

“Everybody asks,” says Aurelieu, “but each of the islands are different. On Mahé, for example, you’ll find granite boulders along the shore. Here, we rely on plants to hold back erosion, which is why beach profiling is so important.”

“We?”

“The Island Conservation Society.”

The Realities of a Private Island in the Seychelles

Desroches is a private island with a single hotel and a flotilla of villas on the sand. Yet over 40% of the Seychelles is formally protected – and a poor report from the ICS can result in closure of an offending hotel.

I watch Aurelieu and his team do their work on the beach. They pace, count, measure, write, record and repeat.

“Is there a conflict between their work and the desires of the hotel?”

“Not really,” he says. “At least not here. It’s a quiet place, with few lights on the shore to distract the turtles. We did have a consultation about the position of the spa – so they agreed to move it.”

“And how about the guests? Any conflict between what they want and what you’re trying to do?”

Wills & Kate did stay here, albeit before she became a princess.

He shifts a little.

“The trouble is that people want to come to a desert island but they want every comfort from home. Air conditioning. Television. Internet.

“It’s very hard to get people to care about environmental issues.

“People see this place as an escape for a week or two and then they go ‘back to reality.’ It’s difficult for them to see that this is the real world. That the hawksbills are dying, that 80% of the earth’s oxygen comes from the sea, that seaweed is a sign of a healthy ecosystem rather than a nuisance to be swept away, that shrubs on the sand protect the beach from erosion, even if they spoil the view.”

The Real World

He pauses for breath, this tall and eloquent man from Mauritius. We’re standing on sand in the middle of the Indian Ocean, humidity cloying at our skins, yet the conversation feels like one I’ve had before, on the icy glaciers of Alaska.

Kevin, a naturalist with Inner Sea Discoveries, said this: “At the end of their trip, guests say that ‘it’s time to get back to reality.’ But this is reality. These glaciers, these rivers, these salmon, bears and whales. This is the real world.”

Ice in Alaska, sand in the Seychelles. The memory reminds me of my own eco-guilt.

“And what about global warming, carbon footprints and the like? Do you think, that is…I’ve often wondered… Look, other than flying less – is it worth paying into those carbon offsetting schemes?”

Aurelieu smiles and looks away. I think he’s a kind man.

“Well, they don’t hurt but they aren’t going to solve the problem,” he replies. “It takes twenty years for a tree to grow.”

“Are they just a way for companies to make money from people who want to feel better about themselves?”

He looks away again. “Stopping deforestation would be the quickest thing, the most effective way to make a change.”

“And donating to your society?”

The smile becomes a chuckle. “And donating to the ICS, yes, if you have to put it like that.”

Our buggy arrives to take us back to our villa. His team cycle on to the next profiling point.

From my four-poster bed I gaze out through the windows, while cotton-light curtains rise and fall like slow sighs. I can’t see the water and I can’t see the shore. Scratched patchworks of grass run down to the trees, while scattered sand footprints show my path from the door.

Plants and seaweed protect the white sand beach here.

It’s hard to remember that this is the real world.

Disclosure: I travelled to Desroches Island as a guest of SeyExclusive. As usual, editorial control remains mine, all mine…

*At the time of writing, there have been no further shark attacks reported since the summer of 2011.

What do you think of when you think of the Seychelles?

Sleeping Inside A Volcano – Desroches: A Private Island in the Seychelles first appeared on Inside the Travel Lab. Head over there for more juicy fresh travel goodness. Or, you know, something you might like to read...

Desroches Island: the first view that catches your eye

Desroches Island, Seychelles

Raindrops decorated most of my days in the Seychelles, the hours passing beneath skies streaked with charcoal, while I huddled like an over-protective mother around my-definitely-not-waterproof camera gear. I made footprints in the sand and cycled along the wet earth, feeling it spring from the bounce of the casuarina tree leaves. I took cooking lessons, searched for turtles, experienced beach profiling and battled with my inner emesis on a deep-sea fishing boat (No, I haven’t missed the “n” off and it’s definitely not as spiritual as it sounds. Ask Google.)

But in those brief moments of joyous sunshine, I took photos. Particularly of those Desroches’ creatures who didn’t seem too keen about the rain…

The parts of Desroches Island visible at second glance...

Disclosure: I travelled to Desroches Island as a guest of SeyExclusive. As usual, editorial control remains mine, all mine…

Desroches Island: The Seychelles in the Sun first appeared on Inside the Travel Lab. Head over there for more juicy fresh travel goodness. Or, you know, something you might like to read...

Ouchijuku Village, Japan

For some reason, these photos look calm. Yet in reality, a blizzard raged and the muted glow of the snow-plough’s headlights provided just enough light to let me capture this scene: fragile, snow-cloaked candles beneath an otherwise relentless black sky. Sleet assaulted our eyes, abraded our cheeks and hounded our cameras, while our voices had long since been swept away.

This street, a beautifully preserved row of thatched cottages from Japan’s Edo Period, is only 300 metres long.

Walking it under these conditions, felt like 300 years. Which is handy, really, since that’s roughly how old the place is.

Ouchijuku Village used to be an important staging post on the route between Imaichi and Aizu Wakamatsu. Over time, the world grew faster and its importance faded away. Yet it kept its character and today provides a delicious taste of traditional life in Japan.

As does this photo of a woman waiting for us as we arrived at our hotel. Total and utter dedication. And possibly frostbite. I shiver at the thought.

Disclosure: I visited Japan in 2011 as a guest of the tourist board. As ever, I have complete editorial freedom.

This post forms part of Photo Friday on Delicious Baby. Head over there for some more travel pics.

A Quiet, Snowy Village in Japan first appeared on Inside the Travel Lab. Head over there for more juicy fresh travel goodness. Or, you know, something you might like to read...

I stand in another queue. Alone, in silence. Paperwork in one hand, a heap of clothing in the other, limp yet heavy like the body of a sleeping child. It’s cold outside.

I wait.

I queue.

I hand over my camera.

Number 60 Andrássy Street, The House of Terror

Number 60 Andrássy Street has credentials that would wither estate agents into anthrax-laden dust. And they’re enough to make the rest of us weep and drop to our knees, wondering whether to just give up on this whole thing called the human race.

Number 60 Andrássy Street was once the Hungarian Headquarters for the Nazis. After their defeat at the end of WWII, it became the headquarters for the secret police of the totalitarian communist state. Now, finally, this former mansion on the Champs-Élysées-like boulevard functions as a museum, albeit one that draws criticism for its biased interpretation of crimes on Hungarian soil.

I wait in the queue and hear an old man sobbing, sobbing and sobbing, again and again on a video loop while receptionists chat to each other and horror sound effects filter down from another floor.

It’s a queasy, conflicted feeling I first experienced on a muddy hilltop on the outskirts of Krakow, shoes soaked in melting snow. The site of a former concentration camp (the one shown in Schindler’s List,) this hill was also the viewpoint for a bland international shopping centre, a splodge of simplistic yellows and reds amidst grey and grit-lined car parks.

A few teens used it as a shortcut and an older woman strode past, walking her dog. My presence there seemed absurd and I shivered back to my hotel, numbed in more ways than one.

The following day, I visited Auschwitz, where history hadn’t been cleared away; it hadn’t been reconstructed. It just stood. As it was. As it had been.

Here at 60 Andrássy Street, things are different. A lot of effort has been expended creating a multimedia experience that tries to fill in the gaps: the aching, inexplicable voids that history has left.

And it’s not interested in nuance. Nor self-reflection.

Hungary’s history during the 20^th century does not make for pleasant reading. Part of the Habsburg’s Austro-Hungarian empire at the start of the century, its defeat in World War One stripped it of territory and, by the look of things in this museum, an enormous amount of pride.

When World War Two broke out, a democratic Hungary sided with Hitler and the Axis powers before entering into years of complex diplomacy within the maelstrom of the world’s deadliest conflict. Siding with Hitler yet trying to negotiate peace with the UK and US. Passing anti-semitic laws yet keeping Jews from the concentration camps. Aggression against Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union, yet trying to keep the war from its doors.

It’s a fascinating, terrifying, deadly memoir of conflict and survival amid the howling storm of contrasting – and ultimately catastrophic – ideologies on both sides.

It was doomed to fail.

And it was doomed to fail. On learning of Hungary’s negotiations with the West in 1944, Hitler sent in his own troops, transported over 600 000 to the concentration camps and fought to the end against the Soviets in the siege of Budapest.

The whole period raises questions about the fight for freedom, appeasement, coercion, diplomacy, national pride, borders, identity and more…yet the museum itself addresses none of these. In fact, it barely mentions Hungary’s role throughout those years, only its losses.

But those losses, Hungary’s losses, were staggering. Ten percent of the population dead – and occupation by the Soviet Red Army.

Within two years, democracy had gone. So had the leaders of the opposition.

The House of Terror launches a scathing account of the Stalinist years. Reconstructed interrogation rooms. Twisted agricultural policy. Deportation accounts. Old uniforms. The gulag. Bread shortages. Old photographs. Paranoia. Betrayal. The disruption of religious life.

It’s a stifling amount of information that’s difficult to sift through in one go. And it’s certainly the most damning view of life behind the iron curtain I’ve seen so far during my #ironroute journey.

A guard directs me to a lift.

The doors slam, the lights go out, and the machine screeches slowly towards the basement. In the shadows, a prisoner is led along an underground corridor, his final footsteps before his state execution.

The doors open into clawing darkness and a stench of urine. It’s the same corridor, the same cells, the same short walk to the scaffold.

I begin to feel sick.

Later, back in daylight and pacing along the frosted pavement, surrounded by leafy beauty and resplendent buildings, my mind feels uneasy again.

It hovers on the power of place and reality in trying to come to terms with the crimes of the past. It hovers on freedom of speech, capital punishment, genocide and fear. It realises for the first time that a part of me is grateful for our current Prime Minister. And even the tabloid press. And even the ill-informed criticisms about my own work.

Disturbing thoughts indeed.

I’m out of breath by the time I reach the Hungarian Parliament Building.

I stand in the queue, a man turns me back.

I stand in another queue. Alone, in silence. Paperwork in one hand, a heap of clothing in the other, limp yet heavy like the body of a sleeping child. It’s cold outside.

I wait.

I queue.

I hand over my camera.

I get to keep it. They hand it back.

Photos of the Parliament Building to follow.

This post forms part of the #ironroute journey from Istanbul to Berlin by train with InterRail.

The House of Terror in Budapest first appeared on Inside the Travel Lab. Head over there for more juicy fresh travel goodness. Or, you know, something you might like to read...

January

It’s January. It’s dark, it’s cold, it’s boring. Well, unless you live in the southern hemisphere, I suppose, when it’s party on the beach time. In which case, you’re probably outside enjoying yourself instead of shivering under the duvet and reading this on a computer screen.

A-n-y-way, since January’s often the month for putting in that special effort to lose weight, learn a new language, write a novel, dig out the paperwork and apply for that license to fly a spaceship to the moon, I’ve been thinking a lot about the notion of inspiration.

Particularly since I’ve been browsing through a new online toy called Pinterest.

This latest addition to the internet playground lets you “pin” pictures, links and lines of text to a virtual pinboard of your own. It’s very quick and easy – and very visual. Like Twitter, you can “follow” people and they can “follow” you but you can also filter their cyber-offerings to only read the things that interest you – and to ditch the things that don’t.

I’m still experimenting with my Pinterest account but at the moment I have boards called Make Me Think, Make Me Smile, Inspire Me, Tempt Me, Show Me, as I do on the home page of this blog. But I also have Show Me Freelance Tips, Books Worth Reading and Places I Love – and I’m open to other suggestions.

Some social media gadgets I use because I feel have to, as a way of keeping my job on the road. Others, like Pinterest, I simply enjoy.

So when a “pin” company contacted me and offered to pay me if I wrote about them, it was one of the few occasions when I didn’t just press delete. We chatted a little more and the idea for a competition came up and with it, the better idea of presenting the cash as a prize instead.

Since January is dark, cold and generally boring (see above) and I’d been pondering the notion of inspiration, that was the theme I was going to run with for this Pinterest competition. I was flirting with the idea of asking you to create your own pinboard on the subject of inspiration – from fluffy pink kittens mewing cute songs in harmony to outrageous rap lyrics with only swear words in them, to heartfelt messages of hope, to those posters that say “Failure. When Your Best Simply Isn’t Good Enough.” Whatever inspires you, basically.

Except, as it turns out, it wasn’t for Pinterest but a suspiciously similar-sounding company with a name and logo as different to Pinterest as a blackout is to a coal mine (forgive the analogy, I’m only just back from Wales.)

So, I cancelled that plan, wished I’d pressed delete earlier and then thought to, er,  heck with it (hi mum and young and impressionable folk) I’ll run a competition anyway on my own terms.

The Prizes

Win a copy of the European City Breaks Guide

A luscious copy of the European City Breaks Footprint Guide that features glossy photos, practical information and cultural conversation about cities like London, Seville, Istanbul, Prague and Vienna. I’ve seen a copy and I love it. Love it.

$100USD in Amazon Gift Vouchers – for you to spend as you see fit on your own brand of inspiration.

To Enter

Sign up to any ONE of the following that you like by 14^th February. That’s right, any rather than all. Of course, I’d love you to sign up to every single thing on offer and then encourage your friends to do the same but it doesn’t have to be that way. Unless of course, you want it to be…

Join the Monthly-ish Newsletter

For updates on the best of Inside the Travel Lab plus juicy travel giveaways, exclusive material and free wallpaper for your computer.

Sign up for Email Updates

Instead of once a month, get an email every single time a new article appears here on Inside the Travel Lab. No need to actually click through to this website to see it. Being lazy has never looked so good.

“Like” Inside the Travel Lab on Facebook

Daily-ish travel photos, useful links and witty & incisive commentary (now steady on – Ed) delivered straight to your Facebook page. Being lazy and social has never looked so good.

Follow me on Pinterest

For fun. And for more witty and incisive, er, pins. Look, pinterest looks good. It makes you look good, it makes me look good, it probably makes Vidal Sassoon look good.

Follow Inside the Travel Lab on Google Plus

If you prefer the mighty G to the Facebook Blue.

What inspires you in January?

Oh – and if you come across anything inspiring on your cyber travels, let me know about it in the comments section. After all, it’s January, and it is still dark and cold outside.

Win $100, A Book, And Lashings of Inspiration first appeared on Inside the Travel Lab. Head over there for more juicy fresh travel goodness. Or, you know, something you might like to read...

Everyone was cold. I saw it in the hunched shoulders and stooped spines of the commuters who huddled past, bundled beneath thick duffel coats, pressed scarves and peaked hats.

Which was why the drain surprised me.

Whimsical fingers of mist curled through the gaps, growing thinner as they spiralled up towards the sky, the sky which experience told me still loomed overhead but which I avoided looking at in case I inadvertently exposed another sliver of my neck to Budapest’s biting air.

No, these wisps of steam alone could tell me that I was on the right track, that my heavy, hurried feet were carrying me towards the Szechenyi Baths.

Baths in Budapest

Thermal baths are to Budapest what baguettes and boulangeries are to Paris or yellow taxis are to New York. From the Szechenyi, to the Gellert, to the Lukacs, a range of extravagant, resplendent buildings reside on both the Buda and Pest sides of the city, plunging beneath the earth to draw up thermal waters for the benefit of cleansing and healing its citizens, not to mention providing the necessary environment for a game of chess.

That’s right, chess. I’d seen the iconic pictures, now I longed to see the real thing.

Thanks to the lovely people at the Budapest Tourist Office, I’d been granted the right to take photos within the Szechenyi Baths. No thanks to the hideous behaviour of one woman at the admission gate, most of that time was lost. A story for perhaps another day, despite its insight into life before and after the fall of the iron curtain and the interesting debate about clothing, steam and near freezing temperatures.

Eventually, I was in – and the clock was ticking.

Changing Rooms: Cropped to Protect Those Within

I raced through the subterranean changing rooms with their peeling paint and faint sense of psychiatric prisons from films of the 1950s. I strode through the exercise rooms with skull-capped water aerobics classes that reinforced that impression. I threw those ubiquitous swimming hats for shoes across my feet and burst into the fresh air of the central area of the Szechenyi Baths…

That reedy steam I’d seen clawing through the drainpipe outside now billowed and bellowed across the outdoor pools, cloaking and claiming swimmers who soaked in its scorching path, not to mention the stony Venus who twisted her spine around to watch.

Here in the heart of Hungary, I watched thermal water turn to vapour in the home of Budapest’s oldest thermal bath (on the Pest side of the city at least.)

And while cold air turned my rapid breath into clouds, I found a place for playing chess.

This post forms part of Photo Friday on Delicious Baby. Head over there to see some more travel photos.

It also forms part of the #IronRoute project - a journey from Istanbul to Berlin that criss-crosses back and forth across the former Iron Curtain. Read all about it here.

The Water of Winter: Baths in Budapest first appeared on Inside the Travel Lab. Head over there for more juicy fresh travel goodness. Or, you know, something you might like to read...

Email Ethics

So, if you remember from last year, people regularly spam me with press releases that they think I should publish over here. They’re usually totally inappropriate and utterly dull, a description that many may think qualifies them perfectly for a slice of cyberspace here on my blog, but that I, delusional as I am in matters of quality and relevance, usually reject. I’d like to call it a discerning eye but I suspect that’s because a mosquito bit me on the eye(lid) last night and hence I now have eyes on the brain (she says, just inviting some neuroscientist smart aleck out there to point out that the optic nerve IS an extension of the brain and thus eyes can’t be on something that they are. To you, I advise you to keep quiet. Say – or worse – publish something like that and everyone will see you for the geek you really are. Oops.)

Moving swiftly on…Ethical travel. It’s the sort of thing that sounds great but that usually means a hotel tries not to wash your towels and attempts instead to sell you a hand-woven bracelet from (supposedly) a village down the street. Judging a single person’s ethics is a sticky, tricky area but bundle a whole load of people together inside the borders of a country with billions of dollars at stake and it gets trickier still.

Well, the guys over at EthicalTraveler.org have put a bit more work into it than most and have come up with a list of the most ethical destinations for 2012 (I know, what are the chances? They’re called EthicalTraveler and they write about ethical travel…)

I walked you through my cynicism this time last year with Can You Score a Country on Ethics? The Top Ten Ethical Destinations for Travellers and I even threw in that sneaky extra L. This, year, though, I’m just going to get on with it.

And get a cold compress for my eye.

Ethical Travel: The Top Ten Destinations for 2012

In alphabetical order

• Argentina *
• The Bahamas
• Chile *
• Costa Rica *
• Dominica *
• Latvia *
• Mauritius
• Palau *
• Serbia
• Uruguay *

Look at this list and what do I discover? I’ve only been to two of them. The message? Clearly I must travel more…(Although fingers crossed, I may be travelling to Costa Rica very soon…)

How about you? How many have you been to? Do you think you can really rate a country on ethics?

You're so ethical I could kiss you

Ethical Travel: Can You Score It? first appeared on Inside the Travel Lab. Head over there for more juicy fresh travel goodness. Or, you know, something you might like to read...

Those of you who know me – and I’ll accept for the purposes of this blog post a very loose definition of the word “know…” Reading a few posts here or tuning in to my ramblings on twitter (shouldn’t that be “witty and incisive social commentary”- Ed?) – would probably have clued you in to the fact that I’m not that kind of wife. Not that kind of girl.

But cooking lessons, I’ve learned (hoho!) provide two cunningly disguised opportunities:

1)      The chance to eat a meal that puts the F into fresh and

2)      The chance to really get chatting with locals

Oh, and every now and then I can reproduce the results at home. Not that any specific examples spring to mind right now… The odd bodged one here and there…Another couple that weren’t too bad…But it’s the taking part that counts, right?

Don’t answer that, at least not yet.

Enter Beit Sitti, a cooking school in Jordan’s capital, Amman

Beit Sitti, A Cooking School in Jordan

You couldn’t ask for a better sense of atmosphere…Hidden at the top of a barely-lit staircase, the smoky orange lights of the city glimmered both in the distance and up close as we arrived. The walls inside were fresh and white, punctuated only by a mirror with borders that glittered like jewels dipped in chocolate.

We weren’t in a school, we were in a Jordanian home. Not that we had long to appreciate it.

Maria, the English-speaking of our two chefs, moves at about twice my speed and speaks at about thrice my volume despite being half my size.

She confiscates my camera, my  pen and my notebook and I’m set to work. Hands washed, sleeves rolled, apron tied, knife at the ready.

She eases me in gently, by giving me an onion to chop. I relax a little. 1950s housewife I may not be, but even I can chop an onion.

“You might find it works better,” she says ten seconds later, “if you do it like this.”

She pinches one side of the halved onion and slices it swiftly until it resembles a closed accordion. She then holds that tight, turns the knife on its side and cuts parallel to the table, aiming for her palm. After enough shifts spent stitching together fingers in my former life, I can’t help but flinch at the sight.

“Here,” she sets down a glass of cloudy liquid. “Have some arak. It’s like Arabic ouzo.”

Never has a description enticed me less.

Arak - "Arabic Ouzo"

Jordanian Food After Arak

Aniseed fires along my throat and we move on to chopping parsley. Later, outside in the balmy night air, I fry pitta bread and potatoes with Ali, our driver, a timely reminder that preparing food crosses all language barriers.

Back inside, I peel smoked aubergines under the supervision of our haja.

“Haja is a term of respect for older people,” Maria explains. “People who have completed the Haj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. Haj for men, Haja for women.”

Our haja smiles, adjusts the knife so that I chop ingredients into even smaller pieces, and Maria continues talking.

“I am a ‘trained chef’ in that I take professional cooking classes – although most of that is about French food, but really our Haja know more about cooking than me. Cooking classes of any kind are a strange idea for that generation because the women here learned it all as they were growing up, they learned everything they needed to know about food and cooking that way, at home, as part of normal life.”

So, are the meals we’re preparing (recipes below) fresh from fancy chef school or do everyday Jordanians make these meals at home?

“It’s a mixture,” says Maria, and our driver nods to agree.

“The mouttabal, fattoush and siniyet kafta people regularly make at home,” she says. “Whereas knafeh people tend to buy from bakeries for graduations… Or weddings…For special occasions.”

My hands fluff knafeh dough and ghee with squidgy satisfaction.

“We want to show people that they can make knafeh themselves – easily – at home.”

Easily, eh?

Cooking can be fun...

Characteristics of Jordanian Food

Tonight, Isabelle and I are the only guests but I wonder who their usual customers are.

Maria gives a wry smile.

“When we opened, around a year ago, we thought that our guests would mainly be tourists. But then with the riots and uprisings elsewhere in the Middle East, people stopped coming to Jordan even though we didn’t have trouble here.

“So, we started reaching out to people here in Amman and it’s turned out to be very popular.”

I wash my hands and head out to the barbecue where aubergine fizzes and spits on the naked flames.

Jordanian food relies heavily on fresh ingredients, often finely chopped. It throws in a hefty dose of subtle spices I’ve since struggled to find at home: sumac, tahini and bakleh. Most meat dishes come with salads that burst with their own flavour, rather than using separate salad dressing as a crutch, and meals usually take the guise of a self-service kind of affair. Broad ceramic dishes glazed in royal blue are set down on the table, from which everyone helps themselves.

It’s tasty and healthy, well, except for the knafeh that oozes with that kind of sweet, delicious moisture that you know can’t come from polyunsaturated lipids.

It’s also surprisingly easy to make. Although I rather wish I hadn’t told you that, in case I ever invite you over for dinner.

You should always remember, though, it’s good manners to look impressed.

Jordanian Food Recipes

Fattoush at Beit Sitti

Siniyet Kafta at Beit Sitti

Moutabbal at Beit Sitti

Knafeh at Beit Sitti

The Early Stages of Siniyet Kafta

Making Siniyet Kafta

Jordanian Food: Sumac, Spice & Slice first appeared on Inside the Travel Lab. Head over there for more juicy fresh travel goodness. Or, you know, something you might like to read...

Travel Zagreb through these photos from the #ironroute…

This Photo Friday, I bring you Croatia’s Capital at its warm and wintry best. Check out more about the #ironroute over here and watch this space for the words…They’re on their way…

How would you choose which photos to use to show a whole city?

Travel Zagreb Through Photos – The 5th City on the #IronRoute first appeared on Inside the Travel Lab. Head over there for more juicy fresh travel goodness. Or, you know, something you might like to read...

Tasting India by Christine Manfield is clearly a labour of love.

With India, it’s difficult to know where to start, how best to capture its essence.

So reads the opening line of the book. But the same could be said about reviewing Tasting India itself.

Tasting India spills over nearly 500 pages, peppered with sumptuous photography from Anson Smart that captures the details of India. You’ll find accommodation listings at the back, a ribboned bookmark in the middle and pages and pages of beautiful essays about the regions of India, from Kolkata and Darjeeling to Rajasthan, Mumbai and Goa.

It’s a love song  – or sonnet – to India and a publication that certainly stays far from the real-life grit and grime of the streets. Yet before I veer into discussing the portrait of India it paints, I shouldn’t forget to talk about the whole driving force behind the book: the food.

Tasting India provides recipes for almost every taste, although they’re not from the Quick Cheat’s School of Cooking, that’s for sure. I couldn’t find more than half the ingredients listed (although I was in Seville at the time,) so in the end I plumped for “sweet and sour tomatoes” for my first trial run.

With only two bullet points worth of instructions, the recipe seemed ideal for maintaining my “amateur” status, should making Indian (or indeed any) Food one day become an Olympic Sport. (Gymnastics, by now, is probably out of the question after all.)

But back to the tomatoes.

My tastebuds shiver at the memory of it. Fresh coriander, a sharp syrupy tang, an easy dish to make…I’m hooked. This would normally be the point where I should introduce a staggeringly mouth-watering picture of my own culinary efforts…but one look at the state of my kitchen could put you off food for life. I’m working on it. New Year’s Resolutions and all that…

In the meantime…Thank you Christine Manfield for introducing me to this wonderful piece of work and reawakening my enthusiasm, if not proficiency, for cooking – and for India.

Disclosure: I was provided with a copy of Tasting India by Christine Manfield for review purposes on the understanding that I was free to review it independently. As usual. As always.

Tasting India by Christine Manfield RRP £40

Tasting India – A book to fall in love with first appeared on Inside the Travel Lab. Head over there for more juicy fresh travel goodness. Or, you know, something you might like to read...