• Some Tips for the Long-Distance Traveller

    A Kurdish friend of mine in Sulaymaniyah in northern Iraq recently posted an image of a hand-drawn diagram on his Facebook page. With little arrows and stick figures and pictures of a train and boat or two, the diagram shows how to get from Turkey to the German border in twenty easy steps. After you’ve made the thousand-mile trip to western Turkey, the journey proper begins with a taxi to Izmir on the coast. An arrow points to the next stage: a boat across the Aegean to ‘a Greek island’, costing between €950 and €1200. Another boat takes you to Athens. A train – looking like a mangled caterpillar – leads to Thessaloniki. Walking, buses and two more worm-like trains take you across Macedonia to Skopje, and then through Serbia to Belgrade. A stick figure walks across the border into Hungary near the city of Szeged. Then it’s on to Budapest by taxi, and another taxi across the whole of Austria. At the bottom of the page a little blue stick figure is jumping in the air waving a flag. He has arrived in Germany, saying hello to Munich, after a journey of some three thousand miles, taking perhaps three weeks, at a total cost of $2400.


    http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n19/ghaith-abdul-ahad/some-tips-for-the-long-distance-traveller
    #migrations #asile #réfugiés #visualisation #parcours_migratoire #dessin #esquisse #itinéraire_migratoire #Balkans
    cc @reka

    Plus loin dans le texte :

    Not all smugglers toil at the dirt tracks on the frontiers between nations. Nabil is a Swedish-Iraqi whose main talent is marketing. His job has been made difficult lately: who needs a smuggler if they can find their own way to Europe? He made the decision to cater for more exclusive clients, those who want to spare themselves and their families the hardship of a long trek through the Balkans.

    #smugglers #passeurs