Wish you WEREN’T here?
You might love holidays off the beaten track, but probably wouldn’t make a beeline for the world’s most dangerous places. But for this Scots mum, a fortnight in Tenerife can’t top being the only woman tourist in a warzone...
‘I was scared once, in Pakistan’
EVEN on a busy market day in downtown Kabul, the tempting wares of stallholders and street hawkers are no match for the striking blonde gliding past with a crowd of worshippers in tow. Young children stick to her side like glue, while every few minutes unabashed teenagers stop her to say hello. Where is she from, each one asks in faltering English, and what she is doing there?
Progress in Afghanistan is always slow for Emma Witters but she greets the constant pestering with a broad smile, patiently answering all their questions as she fiddles with her colourful headscarf and films each encounter on her camera phone.
The deep fascination she engenders in locals is entirely understandable, of course. Western women have been something of a rarity in these warravaged lands lately. Indeed, Witters was among the first to return to Afghanistan since the Taliban notionally re-opened its borders to tourists in the summer, a year after they seized power.
Less clear, perhaps, is why this spry 54-year-old Scot should choose to holiday in one of the most dangerous places on earth, a country the British Government still advises all visitors to steer well clear of in the strongest of terms.
Yet her decision to follow the route less travelled is no accident and Witters is more than just a tourist. She is a travel videoblogger – a vlogger, who makes videos about her experiences and uploads them to social media in the hope of making money.
In all, the mother of two has made three trips criss-crossing the country with an itinerary that included the one-time killing fields of Helmand and Kandahar.
She has attracted notoriety – and some criticism – for the content and comments she has posted on her Instagram page and the YouTube channel she calls Wandering Emma.
There is no doubt that in the few months she spent in the country, she became something of a media sensation, even making the Afghan television news, under the headline, ‘Scottish tourist: I love Afghanistan’, which aired some of her street encounters.
‘People ask me for selfies all the time,’ said Witters, originally from Hawick, Roxburghshire. ‘Most of the people I met have never even seen a foreigner before.’
In the past 18 months, this extreme tourist has meandered through Iraq, Pakistan and Bangladesh before pitching up in Afghanistan two months ago.
‘Honestly, I didn’t know how beautiful Afghanistan was before I came,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know much about the country other than the war. I like to go to places that are kind of unexplored. That’s what attracted me.
‘I went to Iraq when it opened up and I know that places are not as dangerous as the Western media sometimes make them out to be.
‘I was one of the first tourists to go to Iraq and I ended up spending four-and-a-half months there travelling all over by myself and locals were just so nice and welcoming, considering they have been through hell for 30-odd years. I’ve never met people like that in my life.’ It’s fair to say any tourists who follow her won’t be going for the nightlife.
‘Iraq has a big social scene and everyone goes out at night and has tea,’ she said. ‘In Afghanistan, there was not a lot to do in the evenings; everything’s closed by nine o’clock. It’s just tradition.
‘I would go out for dinner and be back in my hotel room for 8pm and start editing my YouTube videos. Driving on these roads and walking around, it was tiring – it’s not a holiday.’
Some of her most popular clips showing her exchanges with mobs of cheeky urchins and charmed locals have gone viral, including a TikTok snippet of her being groped by a youngster in Kabul before scolding her attacker.
Sexual assaults against women, Witters learned subsequently, are commonplace but rarely caught on camera.
That incident brought trouble as well as fame. Her attacker’s ‘uncles’ went to her hotel and demanded she make a new video saying she was mistaken about who groped her, but she stood her ground.
She claims not to scare easily. ‘Maybe that’s why I get around so well, because I don’t show fear,’ she said. ‘I was scared once, in Pakistan, when a local offered to take me and a local friend for a drive to see some animals... Instead, he drove into the Khyber Pass, where foreigners are forbidden to go for safety reasons.
‘There’s a lot of Isis there. The guy said, “If I smell danger, I can stop”. I told him, “You can’t smell danger. You need to turn back, I’m not allowed here”. But it all turned out OK.’
So, there are some places on the map that even she won’t go. The British Government, which has had no consul in the country since the Taliban overthrew a Westernbacked government last year, would probably rather she didn’t go to many other places on her bucket list.
The Foreign Office warns of a ‘heightened risk of detention of British nationals’ in Afghanistan, something Witters became used to, having been routinely seized and released by Taliban soldiers during her self-funded stay, usually for videoing in the wrong place.
On one trip to Kandahar, she was settling down to an evening meal when ten armed Taliban burst in and took her to their compound for questioning. After an interrogation, the militants relaxed.
Witters said: ‘They said they had never seen a tourist. They checked our papers and then asked if we wanted food. We went from being questioned to them peeling pomegranates for us.’
She added: ‘I’m not afraid of the Taliban, I just try to be normal around them. One of them took my camera out of my hand once when I was walking along filming and I made such a scene that some locals came and helped me.
‘After he made phone calls to find out who the hell I was, he gave me my camera back.’
It is, she said, hard to know what the rules are, although she admits pure mischief made her sit in the men’s sections of dining rooms, ‘especially if there are Taliban, just to make them feel awkward’.
She even took the wheel of a car to go through Taliban checkpoints, just to see what would happen in a country where women are banned from driving.
‘I was pulled over,’ she said. ‘I was just sitting there in a sweat. They let me go. I was a foreign woman, privileged.’
It’s a different kind of pampering to a five-star, all-inclusive hotel, though. Tourists like her remain on a tight rein, forced to travel everywhere accompanied by guides and drivers – it is illegal to go about Afghanistan alone.
In Helmand she was forced to have a Taliban guard, who never spoke to her or revealed his name, but he did leave his AK-47 assault rifle when he went to the toilet.
Nevertheless, she acknowledges she is far freer than any Afghan woman. One brief video of her shooting an AK-47 at a firing test site surrounded by armed locals
‘They are slowly phasing out women’
has amassed more than 21million views. That success is beginning to earn her a modest income to supplement the savings she uses to fund her trips, but she also gives away some of her YouTube earnings to locals – she bought a TV for one family she stayed with.
While her posts are wildly popular with her 70,000 YouTube subscribers, most of whom are homesick exiled Afghans in Britain, Germany and the US, some object to what they regard as a superficial view of their country, claiming she was building a false impression of life under the Taliban.
There has been a recent tightening of sharia law and the erosion of hard-won women’s rights, squeezing them once more to the margins of public life. Most female government workers have lost their jobs, while women are also barred from travelling without a male relative and must cover up with a burqa or hijab when outside the home.
Witters said: ‘I always get some nasty things said about me, like they would say I was being paid by the Taliban. That was the conspiracy theory. And they say, “Stop showing the fake Afghanistan, show the real Afghanistan”, but are people dumb enough to think that I would speak out against the government while I am in the country?’ Besides, she claims to feel safer in Afghanistan than in parts of the US, where there was another mass shooting last week.
‘It is the randomness of the violence in the States that makes me feel unsafe,’ she said.
It was, though, concern over women’s rights that eventually persuaded Witters to leave Afghanistan after two months.
She said: ‘It was when they banned women from the parks and other outdoor areas recently that I couldn’t enjoy myself any more. They are slowly phasing out women. They just want them to be at home.’
Having flown to Tokyo, she plans to post content critical of the treatment of women and other abuses she witnessed. ‘When I post these vlogs, it probably means I won’t ever be able to go back to Afghanistan,’ she added ruefully.
How did a girl from Hawick end up travelling the world’s hotspots? The only child of a single mother, who still lives in Hawick, she says she was ‘very shy’ until she hit her teens when she became ‘a bit of a wild child’.
After leaving Hawick High School, a career in nursing beckoned until a girlfriend suggested they move to London to flatshare. There, she worked as a well-paid nanny for ten years before deciding, on a whim, to move to New York. ‘I was having a bad week in London, everything was going wrong. I lost my job, my flatmate was moving her boyfriend in and he wasn’t my cup of tea and I couldn’t shake a persistent ex, so I just announced I was going to New York. No one believed me, but I just took off.’
There, she met and married the father of her two daughters, Charlotte, 20, and 19-year-old Alice and settled into small-town obscurity in upstate New York.
She split from her husband 14 years ago but remained in the US to bring up her children.
Witters worked latterly as a personal assistant to wealthy families, ‘making sure their lives run smoothly, booking flights and making appointments, taking their dogs to the vet, going downtown to check on their mail in their apartments in the city’.
Travel was her escape from the quotidian. She would collect countries like Scouts collect badges: Bolivia, Colombia, Lebanon, Nepal, Russia and Uzbekistan – the more exotic the better.
‘Every spare penny I made working went into the travel fund,’ she said. ‘I got bored with regular tourist places – at my age, most of my friends are settled and they go to Tenerife for two weeks. I go home and hang out with my daughter’s 21-year-old friends and have more fun with them. I still think I’m 21 sometimes – maybe I am naturally attracted to trouble.
‘I look forward to coming home and to my comfy bed and a bath, but after the second night back, when I’m sitting on the couch watching Netflix, I’m thinking, “I’ve got to get out of here” and I’m planning my next escape.’
She worries that young people are becoming too risk-averse and confesses she didn’t tell anyone she was going to Afghanistan until a couple of days before ‘because I couldn’t be bothered to deal with all the grief that I would get’.
She texted her kids and told them not to worry. ‘They said, “We won’t, we know you by now”.’
So where next? ‘Last time I went back to the US, the immigration guy saw all the visa stamps for Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan and jokingly suggested I should try Venezuela, Yemen, Syria or Libya’. So maybe I will go to one of them after Christmas at home. And maybe Haiti because, well, it’s a bit dodgy too.’
‘Maybe I am attracted to trouble’