The Titanic Awards

Name Melissa Shales
Who? Chairman of the British Guild of Travel Writers and an award-winning guidebook writer and editor. She contributes to a wide range of magazines on travel destinations from Turkey to Barbados She is about to embark on a major new history of the railways in Africa, courtesy of a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship. More at melissashales.co.uk
Age 50
Countries Visited Also around 50

Titanic Nominations
1. Worst Ride on the Back of an Animal Valley of the Kings in Egypt on a suicidal donkey with no stirrups and broken reins – ridiculously funny afterwards, scary at the time riding along a narrow cliff path and a steep scree slope several hundred feet high.
2. Worst Hotel The Castle Hotel, Mombasa (thankfully closed soon after) which demanded payment up front then told us it had no water. It also had burned out air-conditioning and broken screens, so I got over 50 mosquito bites in a single night.
3. Worst Toilet I am afraid poor Kenya again – at a campsite in Samburu National Park where my activities, arriving at dusk with a torch, disturbed a colony of bats which had taken up residence in the hole in the ground below the toilet and flew up between my legs, leaving me stumbling round the camp, trousers round my ankles.
4. Worst Food There is a tie for the most disgusting food I have tasted between Turkish tripe soup (color, texture and taste of wallpaper paste) and Sicilian vastedda (spleen burgers) that are basically the color and taste of feces. Both great local delicacies!
5. Worst Bus Ride A risky journey in Tamil Nadu, South India, when every sign and bus number was written in Tamil and no one spoke English. Eventually a small boy put me on board a rickety overcrowded bus with no windows where I was given pride of place on the boiling hot engine housing and for the next six hours, hoping I was going in the right direction. Luckily I was.