User Reviews

An opening screen shot mentions that Robert Ripley had already visited one hundred twenty two countries in search of oddities for his 'Believe it or Not' series. As a kid I used to turn to that page in the Sunday comic strips first to see what bizarre entries were available that day.

This episode offers up a rather random collection of stories from Northern Africa and the Holy Land. Narrated by Ripley himself, the first explains how Muslim women wear veils in deference to the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed who believed women were unworthy to show their faces except to their husbands. The next entry was exceptionally bizarre - a Sudanese woman who appeared blinded for looking at another woman's man, but the narration then stated that she was merely wearing eye patches for a month as her punishment. Actually, it was more bizarre to me that the woman was smiling rather ecstatically considering her misfortune.

Other quick stops on this tour included the oldest mosque in Algeria, a 'boiling' rainbow bridge waterfall built up from excessive lime deposits, and an Algerian fort claiming it was the location of the first shot fired during the first World War. An interesting tip for modern day politicians came in the form of an Egyptian method for levying an income tax, dependent on how high the water level reached at a certain river location. In times of drought, the surface was so low that no taxes would be levied, a fair enough deal apparently for local farmers whose crops suffered when a lack of water persisted.

Rounding out this quickie segment called for the arrest by Egyptian authorities of a local 'gangster', a look at the purported oldest living thing on the planet, that being the Biblical Tree of Abraham, and the original olive tree where Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane. As interesting as all of this was, I couldn't help thinking that the effort would have been better served with a voice-over that wasn't as droning as Ripley's own narration.