The Highway of the Three Kings

Barbara Toy - add her name to the list of amazing solo women travellers from history. She has published a number of travel books - eight I believe (and a handful of plays/screenplays), this is one of her later books, but the first I have read from this author.
Relatively unknown, with a mere 21 ratings on GR, she is a champion of the Land Rover - most of her travels having been carried out in one, and this book is no exception.

In this book Toy undertakes a perilous journey from Aden (now in Yemen, but at the time a British Colony, with somewhat confusingly the Aden Protectorate covering an adjacent area of land which she also passes through) through Yemen and Saudi Arabia to Jordan and culminating in Syria. Published in 1968, I expect the travels were no more than a year or tow earlier.

Not an easy journey at any time in history, but all the more complex because Toy arrived in Aden without onward visa arrangements, which were well known to be ‘unavailable' from Aden. Not phased she considered things had a way of working themselves out. And of course they did.

I will vent my few frustrations with the book now, to enable me to move on from them - no map. I know... an area which it is almost certain that her readers will not have intimate knowledge of, complex and continually similar place names, border complexities, and yet no map was included. This pretty much preventing me from understanding her route, as I didn't want to stop every 2 pages and google the locations - many of which are probably running different names by now. To accompany no maps were no photographs. This is perhaps more understandable, if the author didn't take photos. At least she didn't mention them in her narrative constantly then not include them, like some travel books. Yes, I expect this is not her call but the publishers call, but it was a terrible one, and costs it a star in my rating.

But to her journey. With assistance from many sources, not all expected ones, Toy sets off from Aden with a guide / assistant. In this case a man she knew from a previous journey (in her A Fool Strikes Oil book I believe she travels through Saudi Arabia, crossing this route). Essentially she is heading for Mecca, knowing, of course that as an infidel she will not be permitted to enter (or approach really), but travelling in convoy with two large trucks overloaded with pilgrims. Together the three vehicles make an efficient team, the Land Rover often scouting the ground ahead and the pilgrims providing man power (literally) to free the Land Rover when it becomes bogged.

Along the way we are given history and culture, relevant to the journey an the people she encounters. The route is interesting, but as noted above - a little hard to follow, visits a hundred places named wadi this and wadi that (wadi meaning valley in Arabic), as well as better know cities, but tended to stick to the smaller places. Once past Mecca, she travels alone (albeit with a guide / assistant) and astounds those who she meets in transit as a woman travelling solo in these places is never expected.

Well worth seeking out if you have any interest in travelling in this fashion, in this time period (late 60's) or in the Arabian Peninsular.

4 stars