Middle East Tourism [30min]

The Middle East is never far from the top of the news agenda and it has been that way for many years now. However the chances for people to actually visit some of the places that feature in the headlines are remote. John McCarthy talks to three journalists and writers who have made many trips to the Middle East and share their unique experience of the various countries of this troubled area: PJ O'Rourke, author of Peace Kills: America's Fun New Imperialism (Picador); John Fullerton, author of This Green Land (Pan); and Shane Brennan, author of In the Tracks of the Ten Thousand: A Journey on Foot Through Turkey, Syria and Iraq (Robert Hale).

PJ O'Rourke is well known for his reports for publications like Vanity Fair, Playboy and Rolling Stone magazines and books such as Holidays in Hell, Eat the Rich, and Parliament of Whores. His latest book, Peace Kills, examines America's involvement in the Balkans and the Middle East and, in particular, the days leading up to and following the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

John Fullerton was the Reuters bureau chief in Beirut in the eighties and the agency's Middle East Diplomatic Correspondent. In those roles he visited nearly every country in the Middle East. His latest novel, This Green Land, is a thriller set against the background of the Lebanese civil war of the mid eighties and early nineties.

Shane Brennan has had a unique opportunity to see the Middle East at close quarters in 2000 and 2001 when he made a journey by foot across Turkey, Syria and Iraq. He did so to follow in the footsteps of Prince Cyrus, whose army made the journey from the north coast of Turkey down to Babylon in Mesopotamia in the 5th century BC in an attempt to overthrow the Persian monarch.