We’re just about at the end of Ramadan – the Islamic month of prayer, fasting and reflection – with Eid forecast for later this week, and my story about best countries to experience Ramadan as a traveller.
To misquote Taylor Swift, January slipped away like a bottle of wine – I spent a lot of time on radio and podcasts, chatting about the travel trends of 2026.
My big takeaways;
Egypt: A radio announcer said while he was introducing me that no-one is going to the Middle East right now. Hello, Egypt? With the Grand Egyptian Museum finally, fully opening in late 2025, all that pent-up demand for Egypt has broken, like the Nile in flood. New Nile cruisers of all persuasions, from petite luxury to giants jostling for space at the docks – it’s all happening this high season.
Every tour company scared off by the disaster happening next door as Israel continues to bomb a population of old men, women and children into oblivion has, of course severely (and deliberately) damaged the tourism industry in the region over the past two years, but with ‘ceasefires’ and the like broken, Egypt is working on a new normal.
Central Asia: Uzbekistan is the ultimate dinner party brag destination right now, and this trend is only going to grow, with all the five ‘stans, including deeply weird Turkmenistan, getting more tourists, more trains and infrastructure as we come for the plov and the turquoise mosques , madrassas and public squares.
Japan: More than a million Australians a year are heading to Japan, it’s not stopping any time soon. Cherry season, ski season, summer, winter – it’s an all-rounder.
Australia still loves Bali as hard as ever, Paris still the top city for visitors, Italy hot as ever while we chase our euro-summer… Canada and Mexico will benefit from the 2026 FIFA matches – it remains to be seen what happens with the third host country, the US, given a high proportion of attendees will not be US citizens. That’s just me slipping the boot in here.
I could go on, or you could simply tap into some of the radio interviews I’ve done recently for ABC Adelaide, ABC nationwide summer, 3GB…
I also had a fun chat with Rory McLaren on ABC Adelaide about travel experiences you can’t have these days – think climbing Uluru (thankfully, because this sacred rock and icon of Australia doesn’t need any more poo on it), inflight cockpit visits (mourning this one) and smoking on trains/flights/most places. Any you’d like to add? I’d love to hear in the comments below.v
Take a listen: https://soundcloud.com/user-367644299/abc-adelaide-radio-lost-travel
In the meantime, travel well!
You’ve booked a holiday to Egypt, but the Grand Egyptian Museum’s (GEM) opening has been postponed…again! “All is not lost!” I say!
Listen on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-106-the-new-cairo-with-belle-jackson-avoiding/id1689931283?i=1000720943277
Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/0sBUGYM7YLATaHjYawp5yq?si=b0a843ca0b4a4408
or via the website at https://theworldawaits.au
As podcast host of The World Awaits travel podcast and an Egypt aficionado, I’m the guest this episode, rounding up the best of new things to do in Cairo.
I share my top three things to do in Cairo, including the best Egyptian museums and neighbourhoods, essential experiences and answers the age-old question, is Cairo safe right now? For more of my travels, including some pretty great footage (if I do say so myself) see https://www.instagram.com/global_salsa
And we have a winner of our tropical Thai holiday giveaway of four nights at Avani+ Khao Lak! Thanks to Avani Hotels & Resorts, who generously offered this prize to our listeners to celebrate our 100th episode!
And finally, our tip this week is how to avoid the rainiest places in the world (unless you love a downpour!), and we cover off the craziest things people have left in Ubers.
Nisanyan was a stone house in rural Turkey, forgotten or ignored for generations and demoted to a lowly stable before its reincarnation into a small, family hotel.
Now, the hotel is its own village outside Selçuk; a series of hand made, whitewash-and-stone cottages, inns and villas along the tree-lined laneway, which I visited on a women’s-only expedition with @intrepidtravel
I wrote about the hotel recently for a cover story in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age newspapers, where we were asked to describe our own idea of heaven.
The nights here are cool and silent, save the toll of a goat’s bell and the final call to prayer from a mosque down in the valley. In my cottage, deep red rugs are thrown over stone floors, handstitched coverlets and cushions adorn well-worn armchairs and my daybed, where I languish, the’ bells and the muezzin’s voice carried to me on the jasmine-scented night air.
Why heaven? Turkish breakfasts are the best on earth – here, the tables are laden with locally pressed olive oil, deep red tomatoes, fresh eggs, honey, handmade cheeses.
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I also have an affinity with oases – their sense of remoteness and salvation for the traveller.
It may be remote – on the edge of the Great Sand Sea and just 50km from the Egypt-Libya border – but Siwa’s log book of visitors cannot fail to impress; top of the list is Alexander the Great, who came to consult the Oracle of Amun in 332AD as part of his campaign to rule this rich land.
A mudbrick Bedouin town, it sits on the edge of the Great Sand Sea. It is filled with palm gardens, and surrounded by perfectly clear salt lakes, while freshwater springs bubble up from the hot sands. The local Bedouin culture is very different from the rest of Egypt, with the warmth and hospitality that befits an oasis town.
It is my slice of heaven on earth.
On the flip side, my idea of HELL ON EARTH is The Wall in Bethlehem, Palestine. Hot, dusty, fume-filled streets are dominated by the paint-spattered topped by watchtowers, which epitomises everything that is broken in the current conflict.
Also, anywhere you witness injustice to people, animals or the environment. The street dogs of Cairo break my heart. As does the dumping of chemical waste on the Israel-Palestinian border. And the plein-air butchers’ markets of Kashmir, where the fly-to-customer ratio is inordinately high.
Fancy splashing out on a luxury hotel for your Egyptian holiday? I’ve been to a few in my time, and let me say that this fabulous country is interwoven with blockbuster stories, best tapped into with a stay in one of its great historic hotels.
Who’s your historical hero? Ramses II? Agatha Christie? Alexander the Great or maybe Winston Churchill?
I’ve rounded up six of the best historic hotels in Egypt, from up in the north in Alexandria to the deep south, in the heart of Nubia, in Aswan. I’ve headed out into the Sahara to the impossibly exotic oasis town of Siwa, where a mudbrick marvel awaits, and onto the shores of the Nile in Luxor with these six stays.
Click here to read the story, which I wrote for the Traveller section of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age newspapers.
This year is a bumper year for Egypt and for travel in Cairo – it’s the 100th anniversary of the discovery of King Tutankhamen’s tomb by Egyptology Howard Carter. It’s also the 200th year of the cracking of the code on the Rosetta Stone, which led us to understand Ancient Egypt’s hieroglyphics. It’s the year that Cairo’s Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) was supposed to have opened – though there is a hint that it will open partially this year, just because 2022 is such a big news year, and because we’ve all been waiting for this museum for more than eight years.
The last surprising “Wonder of the Ancien
t World”. The liveliest of lively street cultures. Fabulous and affordable historic, luxury hotels. A familiar golden backstory prominent in school curriculums around the globe. Cairo, Egypt’s chaotic but captivating capital, is the megalopolis that seems to have it all.
This city, like a colossal bowerbird, has spent millennia sequestering new treasures left in the wake of a parade of invaders from Persia to Macedonia, Assyria to Rome, more recently France and Britain, the last colonial power, to be dispatched in 1956.
Yet for reasons I can never understand, Cairo is given short shrift on travellers’ itineraries, with just a day often allocated on either side of a Nile cruise, or worse, a half day on the way to the airport. The markets! The food! The architecture! The crazy, rushing, structured chaos in which this city survives and thrives. It is one of the world’s biggest cities, it’s inexplicable in its workings, yet it continues to work – in a fashion – to be simultaneously a major Middle Eastern hub and one of the most important cities in Africa.
Summing up more than a decade of ramblings around Cairo, and looking ahead to what’s new in the city, I wrote this story for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age’s Traveller section, titled Pyramid Selling. Click here to read my story.
I hope you enjoy, and let me know what you love – or don’t enjoy – about Cairo.
Coming to you – most appropriately – from Cairo today, I’m sharing my latest story about the rise of women-only tours in the Middle East and surrounds.
When talking about travel in Islamic countries, top of the list of reasons why people refuse to visit is the treatment of women: the lack of access to education and financial independence, enforced dress mandates or the “guardianship” laws and customs that in extreme cases reduce women to the legal standing of a child. There’s also the fear of being ignored, duped or even groped.
Yet to avoid the region would be – in my opinion – to miss out on some of the world’s most lavish ancient civilisations and rich modern cultures.
Click here to read my cover story in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age newspapers, in Australia.
Recently, I went to Saudi Arabia for a holiday. Is that a weird thing to say?
Travelling in the Middle East is a guaranteed dinner party starter: travellers either love it or swear they’ll never set foot in any of its countries – from Egypt to the United Arab Emirate, Saudi Arabia to Qatar.
I love the architecture, the languages, the desert landscapes and the blue waters that fringe the Arabian peninsula. I guess that’s why I keep returning.
I chatted to host Ben Groundwater, with Lisa Pagotto, founder of the awesomely adventurous travel company Crooked Compass on the Flights of Fancy podcast to tease out travel in this most misunderstood of regions.
Click here to listen to the full podcast. Go on, you know you want to!
Hello blog! It’s been a quiet few months as I hit the road for two months in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Dubai. My first story in this fresh new year has an appropriate high note – it’s my review of Ain Dubai (in English, Dubai Eye), the world’s largest observation wheel.
Ain Dubai’s opening coincides with the world fair, Expo 2020, which is currently running in Dubai, until March 2022. Remember that when Paris hosted the world fair, Exposition Universelle, in 1889, it built the Eiffel Tower as the main attraction. And it worked.
Back in Australia, there’s welcome news that the Sunday Traveller section in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age newspapers has returned after nearly two years’ snoozing, just as Australia welcomes the news that our international borders will finally be thrown open to tourists.
While we Australians were allowed to leave in November (necessitating a rush for the border – I can confirm that the few flights available were absolutely mobbed by those of us desperate to reconnect with our families, who we’d been separated from for at least two years), now, anyone vaccinated can enter the country.
Click here to read my story, which runs on the Traveller website and appeared in print in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age (Melbourne) newspapers.
PHOTO CAPTION: Ain Dubai is the world’s largest observation wheel. Credit: Belinda Jackson
With pyramids and gold pharaohs, towering temples and cursed tombs, it’s no wonder Egypt’s been on the tourist trail for the last 4500 years.
One of the stories in the inaugural issue of Arrived, a new quarterly magazine by the family-owned The Travel Corporation, is about the upcoming, loooong-awaited opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM). To complement it, I’ve listed a few more unmissable sights in Egypt including Coptic Cairo, with sites dating from the birth of Christ.
Built over Roman ruins, the Hanging Church (pictured above) is one of the earliest of Cairo’s churches, and definitely its most visited. But don’t bypass the nearby cave where the Holy Family sheltered from the wrath of Herod, which to my mind is far more atmospheric, hidden as it is beneath the Church of St Sergius and Bacchus. Last time I was there, there was talk that the cave was closed to visitors, but we mingled in with a government group to once again breathe the damp, sacred air in this subterranean cave. Walking through the chaotic laneways of Coptic Cairo really is the most extraordinary experience, don’t miss it.