LOL. Yeah I know, Blues. I'm just angsting. That's all. Just letting you know what's on my mind. I certainly intend to wear plenty of warm gear if I need to. And when I think about it, Mike's news, a few years back, that Calgary was enjoying temperatures of -57, makes a Siberian summer seem positively inviting.
But you know, these places are quite safe. I'm in regular contact with people who are or have been riding in them. You shouldn't read too much into the propaganda that gets pumped at us through the western media - it really is propaganda. The Muslim world is vast, and the Middle East is a huge area. It's not all overrun by terrorist fighters, terrorist governments or terroristic military interventions from the West. There are many places where life is going on as normal. I know two round-the-world motorcyclists who tell me that the only place they ever felt seriously unsafe or threatened was in the USA. And I'm probably safer riding in most parts of Iran than I would be in the centre of Nottingham, England which has a big gang problem. It is all a matter of perspective.
That is not to say that there are no dangerous places. I wouldn't like to spend too much time in the Mexican Sierra Madre for instance, where the most common cause of death is homicide, the second is car accidents and the third is cirrhosis of the liver, but once you know that, you can plan your route accordingly. And I'm definitely not heading into Southern Iraq or Syria. I have no intention, for example, of asking a group of ISIS fighters to bunch up so I can get them in a photograph. I'm no hero or twenty-year-old squaddie. I have an acute awareness of my limitations. And I'm certainly not planning to put myself in danger if it can be avoided.
On the other hand, I don't want just to settle for a trip round western Europe. Europe has good roads, good restaurants, decent hotels, liberal laws and, for an EU citizen, free health and dental care. But I've been there, and experienced that. There's a much bigger world out there: bigger than the European imagination can encompass. My European image of the world is no more than a cultural legacy arising from an accident of birth. But from the little travelling I have done outside Europe, I know it is a false image, and often as wrong as it could possibly be. Human beings have many ways of living together and caring for one another, many ways of making life rich and meaningful. They have many histories and many cultures. I want to see how things
really are outside the comfort zone of my European imagination, and come back and share that with others.
Here's something to consider. Judging purely on images presented through our TV screens and newspapers, who would have thought, for instance, that the Palestinians are one of the world's most highly cultured peoples? We have one image. Here is another.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwXrGr- ... g&index=21
(The guy in the middle is Wissam Joubran, not a suicide bomber, but one of the world's greatest instrument makers, an acknowledged master of his craft.)
