Three times a year, cousins Andy Drury and Nigel Green head to war zones, sites of natural disasters and man-made tragedies, or military dictatorships Nigel Green and Andy Drury by the Indian Ocean in Mogadishu. Between them, they estimate they've now spent in excess of £250,000 pursuing their passion
Nigel Green and Andy Drury by the Indian Ocean in Mogadishu. Between them, they estimate they've now spent in excess of £250,000 pursuing their passion

Mogadishu doesn’t feature on many holiday wish lists, and with good reason.

Notorious globally for its bloody warlords, ruthless pirates and religious extremists, the Somali capital is the toxic heart of one of the world’s most spectacularly failed states.

The few Westerners who venture to a city brutalised by civil wars do so in the knowledge that on arrival there will be a bounty on their heads and movement will only be possible under the close protection of armed guards.

For two middle-aged cousins from Surrey, however, such ‘attractions’ only made them even more determined to sample the delights of Mogadishu.
Green and Drury on the border between North and South Korea

Green and Drury on the border between North and South Korea. 'We have a thirst for knowledge, it's that simple,' says Drury

Andy Drury, 47, and Nigel Green, 50, realised their unusual dream just before Christmas, spending 48 hours in ‘The Mog’.

During that time they enjoyed ten minutes shirtless on the city’s Indian Ocean beach, five minutes souvenir-shopping in Bakaara Market (among the anti-aircraft guns and forged passports) and ate at a restaurant protected by a watchtower and machine-gun nest after a suicide bomb plot was foiled there last November. Green, for his part, tried camel.

Together they make an incongruous pair of extreme tourists.

Drury, who is on his second marriage and has four children, two aged three and under, runs a business restoring fire- and flood-damaged properties from a shed at the bottom of his garden.
Green on the back of a Toyota pick-up in Mogadishu, guarded by a Somali soldier

Green on the back of a Toyota pick-up in Mogadishu, guarded by a Somali soldier. Mogadishu was the latest and most ambitious trip in a series of more than 60, stretching back over the last two decades

Green, meanwhile, is a debt collector and a divorced father of three children aged between 17 and 20.

Three times a year they choose to leave the safety and certainty of their Home Counties lives and head to war zones, sites of natural disasters and man-made tragedies, or military dictatorships.

Mogadishu was the latest and most ambitious trip in a series of more than 60, stretching back over the last two decades.

They have visited historic battle grounds such as Agincourt, Waterloo and the D-Day beaches, while also accumulating passport stamps from many Foreign Office advisory black spots including Afghanistan, Chechnya and Sudan.
A North Korean sniper

A North Korean sniper

Over cups of tea in Drury’s terraced house in a village near Guildford, they recount tales of monkey hunting with a primitive tribe in northern India, learning to fire an AK-47 in an Al-Qaeda training camp, knocking on the door of KGB HQ in Minsk and riding the world’s rustiest roller coaster in Pyongyang.

They talk also of running for their lives from the Taliban, being taken captive by Iranian border guards and visiting Chernobyl when the Geiger counter was showing radiation 100 times higher than usual.

Between them, they estimate they’ve now spent in excess of £250,000 pursuing their passion.
Chernobyl nuclear plant

Chernobyl nuclear plant

Their boys’ weekend in Somalia only became possible, they say, when foreign correspondents writing about the city’s incipient renaissance had left for their Christmas break back home.

The ex-SAS soldier and Croatian counter-intelligence officer who offer protection for the media told Drury and Green that the Somali militia would be available to guard them for 48 hours. They had just three weeks to plan their excursion.

The aim, they explain, was to inspect the flashpoints of the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu in which Somali rebels humbled the might of America by downing two attack helicopters, killing 18 U.S. soldiers and wounding a further 80.

It was a fire-fight immortalised eight years later in the Ridley Scott blockbuster Black Hawk Down.

They even found the Black Hawk crash site, which is now under a cactus patch in a suburban back garden.

Then, in a blacked-out 4x4, they followed the path that American Rangers and Delta Force soldiers ran through the killing zone of the ‘Mogadishu Mile’.

Ignoring security advice, they also visited the Olympic Hotel to see for themselves the original target for the failed U.S. mission.

They didn’t make it into the lobby because by the time their security detail pulled them out, lorries were blocking two alleys by the side of the hotel, standard preparation for a kidnap attempt.

So why would two men, under no professional obligation to do so, want to put themselves in the line of fire or at the risk of kidnap, accident or disease?

‘We have a thirst for knowledge, it’s that simple,’ says Drury. ‘We are fascinated by history and by seeing it made. We love war, people, politics and immersing ourselves in different cultures.’
Green plays with a lion cub in Bucharest

Green plays with a lion cub in Bucharest
Wreckage of a Belarusian plane shot down over Mogadishu

Wreckage of a Belarusian plane shot down over Mogadishu

This sounds all very well for those who can drop in, have a look around and then leave, but does this make them voyeurs of other people’s very real misery?

After all, they were shown round the blood-stained classrooms of the school at Beslan where 334 people, including 156 children, were killed by Chechen extremists. Their tour guide was the nephew of the terror mastermind responsible for the atrocity.

‘We don’t go gore-hunting,’ argues Green. ‘As the fathers of children ourselves, you cannot fail to have humanity and empathy. Beslan was the scene of a major terrorist attack and to us a place of legitimate interest.
Behesht e Zahra Martyr's Cemetery in Tehran
Saddam-era torture block in Sulamaniyah, Iraq

Behesht e Zahra Martyr's Cemetery in Tehran (left); Saddam-era torture block in Sulamiyah, Iraq

'Nobody questions a visit to Ground Zero in New York or to Auschwitz or the Killing Fields in Cambodia. They are all mainstream destinations now.’

‘People tend to have three reactions,’ says Drury. ‘Those who are well-travelled themselves are interested and supportive.

'Others don’t understand why we do something dangerous for fun, but they aren’t critical. Then there are those who have a go at us. These are the kind of people who sit on their sofa playing computer games, often set in a combat scenario.’

He, in turn, does not deride more ordinary travel. Last year he went on a family holiday to a typical tourist hotel in Turkey with Shane Richie; he and the EastEnders star are godfather to each other’s children.
Face to face with a headhunter

Face to face with a headhunter

‘We had a lovely time,’ Drury says firmly'

Green, who is greyer, broader and quieter than his cousin, says: ‘We don’t get scared. I think we have lost the fear factor.

'We want tougher challenges — I reckon we have become addicted to the adrenaline.

'The only thing that scares us now is getting too old to travel any more.’

The two men live just five minutes apart and were raised as brothers. Neither can recall having a single argument.

‘We’re lucky in that our interests are entirely shared,’ says Green. ‘We would both drive 100 miles down a road to see a bombed-out building.’

Their more extreme adventures began by accident when in 1994 they planned a trip to the Khyber Pass to trace the footsteps of their great grandfather, a Royal Scots Fusilier.

It fell through because of an earthquake, but with time on their hands, the cousins signed up for a last-minute expedition to Uganda instead.

‘We thought we might see something of the Lord’s Resistance Army (a Ugandan rebel group),’ says Green.

‘But what we got was a load of travellers sitting around a camp fire singing Ging Gang Goolie and moaning.

'We lasted a week and quit to go and see gorillas in the mountains. Then we decided to have a day trip to Zaire, but we got caught and chased out of a banana plantation by a man with a knife. It was a huge adrenaline hit. We’ve never looked back.’

Drury admits they’d like to have made a career out of the skills they’ve accumulated. Perhaps as a combat cameraman and his producer, I suggest.
Drury and Green relaxing at the home of a Pakistani gun runner

Drury and Green relaxing at the home of a Pakistani gun runner

‘Oh God, we’d have loved to,’ says Drury. ‘That would have been our dream job. But sometimes your life is laid out for you.

'My dad got me an apprenticeship in his trade when I was 15. I had a job and prospects, it was to be celebrated. There was no thought that I might want to do anything else; that I might even be able to. Nigel was the same.’

Having seen with their own eyes a world that most people only witness on TV, they still seem to find it hard to articulate why they feel the need to put themselves in harm’s way.

They’re not vain or boastful, although they would love nothing more than the recognition of a television documentary or a book about their exploits.

What cannot be denied is they’re motivated, dedicated and meticulous in their research.

Yet travelling to Mogadishu would appear to represent an improbably high risk for a ‘pleasure trip’, even if they were able to alert U.S. TV networks that they had located a piece of Black Hawk rotor blade in the 20th anniversary year of the Battle of Mogadishu.

Perhaps it is this claim that brings us closest to understanding why Andy Drury and Nigel Green do what they do.

They yearn not just to see history, but perhaps somewhere, somehow, to make a little, too.
ANDY AND NIGEL'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURES

For two unassuming, middle-aged men from the Home Counties, Nigel Green and Andy Drury have racked up more narrow escapes than Indiana Jones.

In Iran, for example, they were taken captive by border guards. Over the course of one baking-hot day they were locked in an empty warehouse, not knowing if they were prisoners, had been kidnapped or were being sold.

Not content with surviving that adventure, they then found themselves in Afghanistan where, while driving up the Swat Valley, they bumped into a Taliban raiding party. They escaped and drove away, pulling into a lay-by ten miles away — only to find a Taliban tea-party under way.

In Georgia, while wading across an icy river towards Chechnya, Russian soldiers started stoning them. They turned back and drove off only to be pulled up at a road block. They thought their number was up but one of the soldiers was suffering a liver complaint, and they were freed on condition they drive the sick man to hospital.

On a later visit to Chechnya, while visiting a memorial to the late president Akhmad Kadyrov, they saw the current president, his Kremlin-friendly son Ramzan Kaydrov (inset, below). He was so astonished to find two British tourists that he agreed to speak to them.

In Iraq, they befriended members of the devil-worshipping Yazidi tribe in the northern part of the country, while on another trip they went monkey-hunting with a primitive tribe in Nagaland, north-eastern India.

And possibly most Indiana Joneslike, in Sudan, while trying to retrace the 1884 Gordon Relief Expedition up the Nile River, they found themselves among the Presidential Guard in Khartoum. A passing cyclist told them the soldiers were discussing machine-gunning them, so they decided to move on…

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-2275171/The-disaster-tourists-Would-holiday-war-torn-Somalia-For-ultimate-thrill-ride.html#ixzz2KTVzmODI
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