Feature: Dan Richardson will be talking about his career at Highgate Library on September 9
Published: 19 August, 2010
by JOSH LOEB
Dan Richardson, veteran traveller and author of several Rough Guides, has written a dark satire exploring what would happen if Egypt’s ‘ultimate catastrophe’ was to take place.
Dan Richardson sounds almost apologetic about the destination for his most recent foreign jaunt. “It was a family holiday to the Italian seaside,” he says. “It was a bit tame.”
But it’s hard to feel sorry for a practitioner of what must be many people’s dream job.
The Dartmouth Park-based travel writer is drawn to the chaotic cities of the Nile Delta and grim, Soviet-era boulevards.
The 52-year-old author of The Rough Guide to Egypt and The Rough Guide to Moscow says he likes “places with a whiff of history. I haven’t gone in for the Condé Nast end of the market.”
His adventurous streak has its roots in what he describes as “a classic north London upbringing” – growing up in a house full of radical lesbians and Satanists and spending time with his grandmother, Cold Comfort Farm author Stella Gibbons.
Aged 16, he lost a hand after falling through a window.
Before he joined Rough Guides he worked on a ship that sailed from Somalia through the Suez Canal at a time when Egyptian and Israeli gunmen were eyeballing each other across it.
Decades later he headed to the Balkans during the war there and he recently wangled work in a war film (despite CGI, there is still a high demand for amputees in explosion scenes).
Richardson’s new novel, Gog – an End Time Mystery, is set two years after an apocalyptic flood caused when the Aswan Dam is blown up. A dark satire, it is a vision of an Egypt overrun with crocodiles and disease, where the Israel Army and Christian missionaries watch over refugee camps.
“I’m not the first person to have the idea because the Israelis once threatened to bomb it and so did Gadaffi,” says Richardson. “An attack on the dam is the elephant in the room as far as Egyptian security goes – nobody wants to think about it because the moment you do you realise it would be the ultimate catastrophe.
“As far as I know there’s no other place in the world where a single piece of civil engineering has got the country in the palm of its hand.
“The Nile is everything for Egypt. It’s the only source of water. Everyone lives in the Nile Valley, but it’s like a Sword of Damocles hanging over them.”
Richardson is no fan of the conspiracy theories rife in the Middle East, but he is obsessed with secret tunnels and heavily fortified infrastructure.
“There’s so much weird stuff under Moscow,” he says. “Under one of the main thoroughfares there is a two mile-long depository for the Oceanographic Institute, which is basically a long corridor full of giant fishes and jellyfish brought up in the 1930s.
“I had an approach from Channel 4 a few years ago. They found this mob in Moscow called The Diggers who specialise in exploring underground stuff and they were going to bring them to London and see if they could infiltrate Q-Whitehall [London’s secret defence labyrinth], but the show was never made.”
Richardson enjoys travelling to unstable or undemocratic parts of the world because, ironically, they can be freer in some ways.
“It’s paradoxical,” he says. “There’s rules and regulations, they want to keep you under their thumb. But at the same time, if you know how to do it, absolutely anything goes. Bizarre stuff happens – things you could never get away with in western Europe.
“I was in eastern Europe before the fall of communism and I knew a guy who worked for a Communist Party travel agency that ran coach tours. They were mostly for pensioners – old communists from Manchester – and one time a guy died on him. He phoned head office, who said if he reported the death to the authorities he would be tied up with red tape for days. So he just propped the guy up at the back of the coach and high-tailed it for West Germany.
“Another time he had some passengers coming into Moscow for a transfer on a flight from Siberia. Their flight from Irkutsk was delayed, so his fixer in Moscow bribed his way to the tarmac side of security and got the ground crew to park a fuel truck in front of the flight that was supposed to be leaving for London, blocking it until the Irkutsk flight arrived. Travelling in places like that can be fun but can also drive you crazy.”
• Dan Richardson will be talking about his novel and his career as a travel writer at Highgate Library, Chester Road, Highgate, on September 9 at 7.30pm. Gog – an End Time Mystery is published by Avantoure, £7.99