A week before having this conversation from Barcelona, Joan Torres was in Mali, a nation where a jihadist insurgency is developing.
This does not concern you.
Trips like that are his day to day.
In 2016, when he was living in Dubai, he founded Against the Compass, an agency specializing in “the least visited and most unusual countries”.
On his website you can see a wide range of places to visit this year, such as Syria, Libya or Iraq.
After making his first trips to Lebanon and Iraqi Kurdistan in 2015, he considered leaving his job in the world of
marketing
.
“I saw that there were certain people who made a living with travel blogs and I got the idea to start one,” she explains.
She then visited countries like Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Eritrea or Pakistan.
“I started writing comprehensive guides to these destinations and eventually organizing group tours.”
For several years now, she has been completely dedicated to his agency.
He assures that in none of his
tours
has he faced dangerous situations, because he knows the countries and knows which areas he can or cannot go to.
“I always give the example of a climber who is going to climb Everest.
There is risk, but the climber needs that adrenaline rush that I need too”.
Against the Compass prices range between 1,000 and 3,000 euros.
The trip to Mali that Joan had just completed, for example, cost €1,900 for eight days, not including plane tickets.
The prices of other agencies are similar.
For example, Young Pioneer Tours offers an equally ambitious range of destinations, and the average cost is only slightly lower.
The motto of this British agency is "We take you to the destinations that your mother does not want you to visit".
Gareth Johnson, the founder, tells by phone from the United Kingdom that it all started in 2008, when he was working as an English teacher in China and began organizing visits to North Korea.
“Then people came up to me to tell me they wanted to go to Chernobyl.
And I agreed, ”he says.
Young Pioneer Tours calls itself "North Korea's #1 Travel Agency."
It organizes dozens of trips a year to the Asian country (for the remainder of 2023 there are more than 30 planned) and even the Kim Jong-un regime has echoed the company in its official media.
“If you go, you have to respect the culture and the rules.
I do not agree with everything that happens in this or other countries that I go to, but being there I know that I must keep my opinions to myself ”, he points out.
For Johnson, "dictatorship" is a very broad term.
He believes that people should travel to stigmatized countries like North Korea and draw their own conclusions.
Travel writer and journalist Luis Mazarrasa explains that visiting countries in conflict can in many cases have an element of morbid interest, but he has made dozens of trips to the Middle East and knows that it is possible to stay out of danger zones.
Even so, he prefers not to give a categorical judgment: “Is it really possible to do tourism right now in Baghdad, for example?
Well, I don't know, it's difficult."
Mazarrasa raises the example of Syria.
Despite the civil war that has been going on since 2011, he affirms that it is a country where people are warm and hospitable to foreigners and that it has an exceptional architectural heritage.
It is clear to him that in the West there is a certain hypocrisy on this subject:
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