Journey Across the Middle East

In the fall of 2025 we flew into Doha with a folder of typed itineraries and a plan that read like a dare: string together every country between the Gulf and the Hindu Kush that most of the world files under someday — or under never. Fifty-three days later we came out the far side at a desert camp in AlUla with ten new stamps, numbers 131 through 140: Qatar, Bahrain, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen's Socotra, Oman, and Saudi Arabia.

The run had a rhythm we didn't fully see until we were inside it. A hard leg — Pakistan into Afghanistan, Iraq into Syria into Lebanon, Socotra — followed by an airlock: a Gulf city with a deep bathtub, a laundry service, and a very tall building, where the passport caught its breath before the next descent. Five of those legs ran on private itineraries from Untamed Borders, and the typed sheets are woven through this page as THE BRIEFING — the plan as it was sold — overlaid with what the passport actually recorded.

Qatar was the calm start: Souq Waqif, the falcon market and falcon hospital, I.M. Pei's Museum of Islamic Art, and hospitality so watchful nobody pours their own water. Bahrain was a 24-minute hop and a slow exhale — beach, spa, and the malls of Manama after dark.

Pakistan was the furthest side quest of our travelling life: Badshahi Mosque and the old city of Lahore, the Wagah border ceremony with the gates shut, the Khewra salt mines, the Gandharan ruins at Taxila and Takht-i-Bahi, and Peshawar — where a one-hour Afghan visa took 48 hours and rewrote the calendar.

Afghanistan was the scariest place we've ever visited and nothing bad happened: Taliban checkpoints between Kabul and the Bamiyan Valley, the empty niches where the giant Buddhas stood until 2001, and the six impossible blue lakes of Band-e-Amir at 2,900 metres. Roughly nine thousand foreign travellers saw the country in 2024; we were two of them. Mazar-e-Sharif stayed on the typed page — the visa ate those days.

Iraq was history at every turn: Babylon with Saddam's name stamped into the bricks, the shrine of Imam Hussein at Karbala, the 4,000-year-old ziggurat of Ur, a speedboat through the Chibayish marshes with Abu Haidar, and the Tree of Knowledge at Qurna, where the Tigris meets the Euphrates on the traditional site of Eden.

Syria will probably go down as our favorite country in the Middle East. Damascus inside the old walls, Krak des Chevaliers at dawn, the norias of Hama, Aleppo's citadel and its slowly reopening souq, Palmyra's ruins, and Maaloula, where they still speak the Aramaic of Jesus' era. Given the opportunity and stability, Syria would be unstoppable.

Lebanon closed a sixteen-day run through four straight 'Do Not Travel' countries — and served the best food in the Middle East. Beirut's marina in the evenings, seven-thousand-year-old Byblos, Batroun behind its Phoenician sea wall, and one very old souvenir that is still stuck in customs.

Socotra was our favorite landscape on Earth, full stop: dragon's blood trees on the Diksam plateau, the dunes of Arher piled against the cliffs, the Homhil pool hanging over the sea, Detwah Lagoon, a dive-shop pet goat, and two Yemeni hospitals in one afternoon. A third of the island's plants grow nowhere else on the planet; a few thousand visitors a year ever see them.

Oman was the deep breath after: the rim of Jabal Akhdar at 2,000 metres, a night among the dunes of the Wahiba Sands with more camels than guests, and Muscat's quiet coves. Saudi Arabia closed the file — Riyadh's projection-lit malls and Diriyah, then Hegra at sunset, the Nabataeans' second city, Saudi Arabia's first UNESCO site, open to travellers only since 2020.

Fifty-three days, fourteen flights, roughly five thousand kilometres by road, fourteen UNESCO World Heritage sites, five Level-4 advisories, three never-reached cities, two hospitals, two empty niches, one folder of briefings — and no regrets. It was the hardest, strangest, most beautiful stretch of travel we have ever put together, and we would do it again in a heartbeat.