Three More Countries Not to Visit
Tuesday, 13 May 2025My recent blog – I’m Not Going There Anymore – soon raised other possibilities for a ‘no go’ list. I should agree immediately that this is a change of attitude for me. For a long time I’ve thought we should go anywhere, it’s important for all sorts of reasons that we make contact with places, good or bad. And I should also admit that it’s very entitled to say ‘you shouldn’t go there’ (or ‘I wouldn’t go back there’) when I’ve already been there.
It’s very similar to all those people proclaiming they’re going to do their bit to save the world by not flying anywhere any more when, it would appear, they have already flown everywhere.
So I suggested I wouldn’t be going back to Russia, until they stop their pointless and utterly evil war on Ukraine, stop shooting down innocent passenger aircraft and stop silly assassination attempts in places like Salisbury in England.
◄ Salisbury Cathedral in England – Putin’s hopeless assassins said they were just visiting Salisbury to see the cathedral, anybody they happened to kill when they were there, well Russian accidents do happen.
I wouldn’t be going back to Saudi Arabia, despite their new found tourism enthusiasm, for a host of reasons. I wouldn’t be going back to the USA until the orange one (aka Liz Trump, aka Donald Trump) retired.
And I wouldn’t be going back to Bali, despite so many good things about Bali, until they did something about the traffic.
Israel
But what about Israel somebody complained? Absolutely right and I’m amazed that when Israel topped my ‘I’m not going back there’ list I should somehow have left it off my blog. I have been to Israel more than once and in 2011 I not only crossed into Palestine/the West Bank from Jordan, but I subsequently travelled extensively around the country (or countries) although not to Gaza. I did a lot of walking, on the West Bank and in Israel both in the north – the Jesus Trail from Nazareth down to the Galilee – and in the Negev Desert in the south. My explorations led to the Israel & Palestine chapter in my book Dark Lands.
My time in Israel included staying with Maoz Inon at the Fauzi Azar Inn in Nazareth and walking with him and two Israeli friends on the Jesus Trail which he had created. If there was one person who gave me hope that some sort of peace and agreement could come to that troubled region then it was Maoz Inon.
◄ Walking the Jesus Trail – with Maoz and a friend, the minaret was on the site of Hattin village, a 1948 site. Which means the Palestinian villagers (1300 of them) fled or were pushed out in 1948 and never got to come back. The only things that survive are parts of the village mosque and Maoz had routed the walk through the village, so we would see this part of the story.
So here was an Israeli working towards better relations between Israelis and Palestinians and his parents were killed in the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023.
What can I say? Maoz says that since the death of his parents ‘I have dedicated myself to make peace between Israelis & Palestinians.’ But sadly I still have Israel on my no go list. Despite the horrors of the Hamas attack I still cannot live with the Israeli attack on Gaza which has now been going on for more than one and a half years. It has to stop.
Belarus
And then there’s Belarus. I had a few interesting days in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, in mid-2018. It was part of a trip that took me from Romania to Moldova to the weird little sliver of unreconstituted Soviet Europe – ie Transnistria – and on to Odessa in Ukraine. Two years previously I’d been at Kyiv in Ukraine and from there made a daytrip to Chernobyl, the nuclear disaster site. It’s worth remembering that the fallout from the power station meltdown may have dusted Ukraine before it drifted on to damage assorted other countries while the USSR denied anything had happened, but it was Belarus, directly north of Chernobyl, where most of the fallout fell.
The Belarus dictator, the brutal Alexander Lukashenko, may look precisely like what he is, a Soviet era thug, and backing up Putin for his war on Ukraine has not enhanced his status. In 2021 he took another step to making his terrible reputation even worse by hijacking Ryanair flight 4978 from Athens in Greece to Vilnius in Lithuania. The Belarusian authorities claimed the Ryanair 737 was facing a bomb threat and forced it to land at Minsk. Belarusian blogger Roman Protasevich (or Pratasevich) and his Russian girlfriend Sofia Sapega were hauled off the Irish aircraft and Protasevich was subsequently sentenced to eight years imprisonment, presumably for saying Lukashenko was not the nicest European ruler.
Sofia Sapega got six years, presumably for going on holiday in Greece with Protasevich.
Fortunately two years later Protasevich was ‘pardoned,’ after he confessed that he’d got it all wrong and really Lukashenko was a wonderful human being. That is to say he made a Soviet-style confession. He’s not allowed to leave Belarus and has to behave himself. Whatever, my interest in Belarus has definitely gone downhill, I’m not planning on any return trips.
◄ Check the route Ryanair 4978 now flies from Athens to Vilnius, it deliberately skirts to the west of Belarus. Michael O’Leary clearly does not want to risk flying over a country where the government might hijack you although at least Belarus wasn’t like Russia and Malaysian flight MH17, they didn’t simply shoot the Ryanair aircraft down.
Burma/Myanmar
Finally (for the moment at least) there’s Burma/Myanmar. Twenty years ago when I was still involved with Lonely Planet we were regularly whacked for publishing a guidebook to Burma.
My last visit to Myanmar was in 2017 when I travelled to Yangon, made my first visit to the country’s absurd capital Nay Pyi Taw and concluded in Mandalay for the Irrawaddy Literary Festival. Where lots of us talked about ‘what the hell are we doing here’ because it was very clear that a country which has gone up and then down for the whole time I’ve been visiting it, the first time was in 1974, was embarking on another stupid downhill plunge.
Only a few months later I visited the flip side of the Myanmar horror story when I travelled to Bangladesh and spent some time in and around the Rohingya refugee settlement there. You could see Myanmar across the Naf River from the refugee settlement.
