The first and funniest book I read about Catalonia, my country of choice at the time, sixteen years ago, was expat Matthew Tree’s travelogue Un anglès viatja per Catalunya per veure si existeix (An Englishman travels through Catalonia to see if it exists).
I am now embarking on a similar, though I expect a much less fun journey, to see if Northern Mesopotamia, from Gaziantep to the Syriac monasteries of Tur Abdin, still exists after the terrible earthquake in February.
That it exists geographically is confirmed by recent Google Earth photos. But I have to find out what the conditions are there, whether our journey leads to disaster tourism.