HOLIDAYS IN HELL
Bullets, suicide bombings and Black Hawk Down, builder turned ‘extreme tourist’ Andrew Drury visits some of the most dangerous places on the planet for fun… even the locals think he’s bonkers
ANDREW Drury left school at 16 with average qualifications and a vague ambition that he might become a painter and decorator. It was an ambition he fulfilled, and then some. He now runs his own building firm employing 40 people. Which is not why the Daily Express is interviewing the father-of-four.
It is what he has done in his spare time that has proved most notable. Because of his eccentric wanderlust and a thirst for danger, Drury has become the world’s best-known extreme tourist. Whereas adventure hunters go off-piste in the Alps or take a canoe up the Amazon, a holiday for him might be a trip to the frontline against ISIS in Iraq; travelling to North Korea; visiting the site of the infamous US “Black Hawk Down” battle in Somalia; or hanging out with jihadi bride Shamima Begum in her Syrian refugee camp.
Frankly the mind boggles, but each to their own. The visits have over the years morphed into a form of citizen journalism, of which more later.
But one thing has remained a constant. The danger which, it must be said, never seems that far away during Drury’s adventures.
“I was in Erbil in northern Iraq in 2004 when ISIS suicide bombers blew up some government buildings just as we were checking into the Erbil Towers Hotel,” he recalls.
“As we were about to check in and get our keys, the windows blew in, showering us in glass.”
Normal tourists would have run a mile, but Drury and his cousin and travel partner Nigel Green were staying in the capital of war-torn Iraqi Kurdistan while travelling from Turkey, through Iraq, and into Iran to visit the old US embassy.
“A lorry driven by a suicide bomber was detonated, killing 55 people,” he continues. “Some US soldiers visited later to say ISIS were aware of our presence and had put a $100,000 dollar reward on our heads because they wanted to use us as hostages. ”
BRITON Ken Bigley, 62, had been murdered by Islamic extremists in Baghdad in October 2004, so the two men knew they had to get out fast and headed for the Iranian border. But they were denied admission and had to drive back through Iraq to Turkey. Which did absolutely nothing to dissuade Drury from more slightly bonkers trips in the intervening years. Does he feel in any way irresponsible?
“Looking back it was selfish and irresponsible, but I certainly didn’t expect anyone to come and rescue me [if I got into trouble] and put their lives at risk,” he says.
“I looked after myself. I put a jam under my door at night so nobody could get in my room. I did my homework, looked at maps and worked out an escape route. Getting killed or wounded never entered my head.You can’t think like that.
“I only go with broadcasters now and they have security. I wouldn’t let my son be an extreme tourist.
“I wanted to experience the emotions and feelings of the locals who find themselves embroiled in horrendous situations through no fault of their own.When I went back to Erbil in 2017 I was a changed man.
I wasn’t going there for bragging rights. I wanted to get a story to explain to people what the fighting was all about.”
This time round, Drury hooked up with a Turkish TV team for a trip to the nearby city of Kirkuk during a lull in the fighting. There he got talking to an Iraqi general with the progovernment Abbas Militia.
“I thought there was an old fashioned brown football lying by the road and pointed it out. But he said it was the stomach of an ISIS suicide bomber from the night before and he casually kicked it into the bushes.”
A firefight started and Drury and his Turkish companions took cover.
“An ISIS drone flew over, followed by heavy machine gun fire,” he recalls. “The bullets were whistling past my head.” The incident,
recounted in his memoir, Trip Hazard, ended with 25 fatalities, among the ISIS fighters.
Drury, who lives with primary teacher wife Rachel and their four children, Holly, 23, Charlie, 22, Bobby, 14, and Ruby, 11, in a quiet former farmhouse in Guildford, Surrey, says his family has become used to his war zone travels. Rachel, he admits, prefers normal family holis days at beach resorts in Cyprus, Dubai and Turkey, where she has the problem of trying to get her husband to just lie on the beach.
Needless to say, the Iraq firefight and suicide bombing were not Drury’s only brush with death.
"The Abbas soldiers were always taking the mickey out of me,” he smiles. “They thought I was an eccen-tric Englishman and couldn’t believe I was walking around in a vest and no body armour.”
Drury received a similar reaction when he travelled to North Korea as a tourist with cousin Nigel in 2008.
“For some barmy reason the North Koreans loved Norman Wisdom, the comic with the funny walk, and they expected British people to behave like him,” he recalls. “We had minders who took us to all these statues of the Kim family, including seeing the body of Kim Jong-il lying in state.
“Before we went into the room we had to stand in front of massive drying machines to blow dust and germs off us. I struggled to stop laughing because there was no way he was going to catch any bugs from us as he’d been dead for quite a while.”
The following day, the pair were taken for a picnic in a forest outside the capital Pyongyang. Locals and visitors alike got drunk on rice wine. “It was one of the weirdest afternoons of my life,” Drury recalls.
In 2010, he took a greater risk by going to Somalia, to visit the site of the 1993 Black Hawk Down incident when a US helicopter was shot down over the capital, Mogadishu, sparking a furious 18-hour firefight that cost 18 American lives.
“We found the remains of the helicopter in the garden of a house,” he says. “It was smashed up but you could make out the rotor blades. We did have a hairy moment when we visited a market area. They were blocking off roads to seal us in.”
Drury was born in Aldershot, Hampshire, where his father Brian worked for the council and mother Barbara looked after an old people’s home. Family holidays were spent at Hayling Island, Southsea and Cornwall if they had the money – a far cry from his later adventures.
After leaving a local comprehensive at 16, Drury became an apprentice painter and decorator before setting up his own building firm.
His younger brother, Robert, died aged just ten from leukaemia, which badly affected Drury, then 11. Today he believes part of the desire to travel to dangerous spots is a reaction to Robert’s loss. “I felt his presence and still do. I was, if you like, taking him with me on those adventures.”
His very first “extreme” trip was to see silverback gorillas in Uganda while dictator Idi Amin was still in power and ruling with an iron fist. “The tree huggers were getting on our nerves, so we left them to their gorillas and cleared off into Zaire where there was a civil war going on.” They were chased by a machetewielding local but, “that moment was the birth of our travels because we both got a huge buzz out of it.”
Later, they went to Ukraine to visit Chernobyl, the first known tourists to make that journey. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, they met heroin dealers and arms smugglers. In Chechnya they visited the Beslan school where 186 children died when Islamist terrorists went on a rampage of hostage taking and murder in 2004.
“When I saw the bullet holes and the faces of the children in photos something happened,” Drury admits. “I stopped wanting to be a voyeur of horror and wanted to get stories out about what was really going on.”
IN 2021 he travelled to Northern Syria to make a film called Danger Zones for Starz, a Disney pay-per-view channel. On a day off from filming, Drury found himself by the Al Roj camp, where ISIS brides were being held. He decided to try and interview Shamima Begum, the British schoolgirl who fled the country aged 15 to become a jihadi bride.
“I had been expecting a hardnosed terrorist but met a frightened rabbit who told me her favourite TV show was Friends and she had a crush on Chandler,” Drury recalls. “I wasn’t an Oxbridge journalist, just a kid from a council estate making some extreme tourism films, and she liked that.At the end of the interview she hugged me, which to this day I find unsettling.
“I took several broadcast journalists back to Syria to interview her and I admit I bought some clothing from Primark for her at her request. At one time I felt sorry for her.”
Today, he believes he was being “groomed by a very clever, manipulative woman, who had memory lapses about ISIS atrocities”.
“My last message to her was… ‘You sold your country out’.”
When the latest Ukraine invasion happened last year, Drury found himself volunteering to rescue a circus bear from near the northern city of Lviv and take it to Romania.
“Masha was heavily sedated but as we were moving her into the back of a transit van, she woke up, which gave us all a bit of a surprise,” he says. “We dropped her and ran and then someone darted her again.”
His next trip will be back to Ukraine. “I am going to meet the mayor of Kyiv,Vitali Klitschko. I may also take a broadcaster to meet President Zelensky. It will only be a short trip. I’m looking forward to a break.”