Where to next?

Well, we're off again. And yet it seems like we'd only just arrived. After five taxing days of sleeping and eating in Barcelona, and before that seven grueling weeks working on a book in Mallorca, the last 12 semi-sedentary days in the UAE have sped by. It's been busy. We had a few days of restaurant reviews, interviews and photo shoots, then time in catching up on loads of writing and planning our next trip from our friend's colossal Abu Dhabi villa, rightly dubbed 'Falcon's Crest'. Picture this: a monumental Arabian villa, sweeping staircase, 20+ rooms, five bathrooms, one of which is nicknamed Hef's (it's all black!), and a gold falcon over the driveway gate.

But, sadly it's all over already and today we're headed back to Dubai to our other 'home away from home', Al Manzil, so we don't miss our early flight to Damascus in the morning. We're trying Jazeera Airways for the first time, and over the next six weeks we'll be testing out a number of low-cost Gulf airlines as we bounce around the region a bit researching stories for in-flights and travel magazines: Syria 2 weeks, Qatar 9 days, Kuwait 5 days, Lebanon 5 days, Jordan 4 days, then back to the UAE again. That's a lot of countries in a short space of time for us with not a lot of time in each place - normally we like to take things a lot more slowly. But it's work, not play: we're doing some feature stories, profiles, and a bunch of hotel and restaurant reviews, as well as having meetings for a couple of book projects we're developing. No, not guidebooks! And for the first time in some years this will be the first trip where we're working on magazine stories only - no guidebooks, thankfully. The last few have really taken their toll... but who's going to listen to a travel writer complain, huh?