Fish Food Feet, Guns and Groping

After living in Syria for over six weeks we finally got round to exploring some more of the country in our holidays last week, when Becka, Everitte and I set off all alone to travel to Palmyra and up the Euphrates to Aleppo. We had had rather a late night the evening before our departure due to meeting up with a couple of English guys we met in Lattakia who turned out to be great company and one of whom, James, worked for a human rights organisation in Serbia and was full of useful information and fascinating stories. We met up with them on Friday night and went to a night of live Latin music at a club called Marmar, where we attempted to dance on the tiny dance floor and choke down the ‘free drink’ which came with the extortionate entry fee, and was pretty much a glass of pure spirits with a thimble full of coke to give it a slight tinge of colour. The band were amazing, but weirdly for me they played a lot of the songs we had on when I was at work in Iggs and Barioja back home in Edinburgh, and it was lovely to hear familiar music, but also made me miss being in Iggs on a Saturday night, running around serving wine and talking to the customers and laughing with Nicki and David.

After the gig we ended up in the garden on Straight Street once again, where we bumped into some friends from the poetry club sitting singing and playing guitar, and ended up sitting out talking and drinking beer with a load of Kurdish guys til 5am. Again. It was a great night, but meant that by Saturday evening we were feeing a little subdued, however we met James for a quick drink at around 11pm, and ended up staying out til about 2am, talking about human rights and war and other cheerful topics of that nature. Consequently we didn’t set of for Palmyra until about 10am on Sunday morning.

The bus ride to Palmyra was comfortable but uneventful, however on our arrival in Petra something happened which was to change everything: we met a young man from New Zealand by the name of Quintin. He was travelling alone and didn’t speak any Arabic, and as we were all heading into the town centre in search of a hotel we decided to share a taxi, and within half an hour, without quite knowing how it happened, we found ourselves in a four bed room in a strange little portacabin on the roof of one of the nicer budget hotels. We were all on a fairly tight budget, and bargained the room down from about £5 to £3 each, before going out to get some lunch. Quintin turned out to be very nice if a little reserved, and had travelled an impressive amount given that he was only 22, and had spent a couple of years living in Singapore, where he worked as a butcher. He came along to lunch with us, then to Palmyra, and then when we said we were heading on to Lake Al-Assad the following day he decided to come with us, meaning that in the end, having met him on our first bus ride, we travelled with him for all six days of our trip before saying a heartfelt if somewhat abrupt farewell to him when we left him in Hama on our final bus ride back to Damascus.

We spent our first afternoon and evening exploring Palmyra, which was interesting, but sadly after Petra and Bosra seemed a little unexciting. Perhaps I simply lack the archaeological knowledge to understand the significance of what we saw, but although we spent a pleasant afternoon and evening wandering among the columns and exploring the citadel, and taking a free ride in a coach full of German tourists who offered us a lift and free entry to the Temple of the Three Brothers with them, by the end of the day we were all quite ready to move on. Strangely we bumped into a couple from Edinburgh, Sam and Tamsin, and Tamsin’s family, who squeezed us into their minibus for a sweaty but rather fun ride up to the citadel, where we watched the rather unimpressive sunset and took the largest group jumping photo yet. As there is nothing to do of an evening in New Palmyra we got an early night, and were up early the next morning ready to set off to Deir as-Zur, a small town on the Euphrates. On the coach ride Becka got chatted up by the Bedouin conductor, who gave her a passport photo of him to keep in her purse, and about 50 sanitary hand wipes to take away!

Deir as-Zur was a refreshing change from places like Petra and Palmyra which exist primarily for tourists, and indeed we saw very few tourists at all, despite spending the whole afternoon and evening wandering around the town, across bridges and along the banks of the Euphrates. It was interesting to spend some time in a real working city, just walking and people watching as opposed to seeing tourist sights. The river itself is beautiful, deep green and wider than I expected, it looked very welcoming indeed, and although we didn’t have swimwear with us we sat and had a drink in a little café next to the river, and saw a group of people swimming in the water, which looked lovely and clean, not nearly as polluted as the Seine or the Thames or the Danube. I kept saying ‘It’s amazing, it’s so old’ to which Becka and Everitte kindly pointed out that all rivers are pretty old, but really it was quite surreal to see the Euphrates, which is something I’ve always thought of as connected with Mesopotamia and therefore with Iraq rather than Syria.

Once again we got an early night in out rather grim looking four bed hostel room, as we had decided to catch the train up the course of the river to Lake al-Assad, and our next stop, a small town called Al-Thowra, which literally translates as ‘Revolution’. We had to get up at 5am to catch the free microbus from the ticket office to the train station, 5km outside town, and consequently I feel asleep in my very suavey first class seat, despite my excitement at the fact that the sun was rising over the river and that I was travelling first class on a train for the first time in my life for the bargain price of £1.75. This was a pity as it meant I missed the views of sunrise over the Euphrates and the ancient ruins along its banks, but Everitte, who was sitting by the window, kindly assures me that they were fantastic! We arrived in Al-Thowra at about 9am, and were immediately accosted by a plump red-faced man, who looked a bit like the Fat Controller from Thomas the Tank Engine, and his taxi driver friend. Between them they negotiated to drive us into town for 100SYP, and then offered to take us on to the lake and Quala’at Jaba’a, where the taxi driver would wait and then bring us back to town in the evening, for a further 500SYP.We didn’t know how long we’d want to spend at the lake, or if there was anywhere to spend the night there, so in the end we negotiated just one way and took the driver’s number when he dropped us off in case we had no way of getting back to town, as the castle turned out to be in the middle of nowhere, perched beside the lake, with nothing but a small open air café nearby, and nowhere to sleep or find transport.

On the drive there we stopped at a police check point and noticed a familiar looking car, and when we arrived at the café and asked if we could leave our bags there we were a little surprised to find the plump man already there before us. He waved us in, told us to leave our bags and then when we said we wanted to look round the castle he told us that it was closed on Tuesdays. We must have looked a bit disbelieving because he assured us it was true, and then said to me in Arabic ‘Is it necessary that you visit?’ and then repeated the word ‘necessary’ several times for emphasis. A little confused I replied that yes, it was very necessary, at which point he called to one of the other men who went off and fetched the biggest key I’ve ever seen which the plump man preceded to hand to me ceremonially and lead the way up to the castle entrance, where he told me to unlock the door. Sadly I was unable to do so, through a combination of weak arms and sheer stupidity, so in the end he had to do it, and lead us in past the deserted entrance desk (where the entry costs were displayed to no avail) and up the stairs to the outside air. He stayed with us for 5 minutes or so, explaining that the Caliph Haroun al-Rashid’s wife lived in the castle before her marriage, and taking photos of us, both on our cameras and on his phone, making what I suspect was a video of us all standing around looking awkward. Then he left, locking the door behind him, and the four of us were alone in the ancient castle.

It is largely its setting which makes Quala’at Jaba’a one of the best forts I have ever seen, that and the fact that we were locked in to explore it by ourselves, but it is a fascinating place in itself in that is it made of bricks, rather than stone blocks, which makes it unlike any of the many other forts we have seen in Syria. The four of us split up to wander around the ruin covered hillside and climb crumbling staircases, but after a while found ourselves congregating simultaneously at the foot of a round tower in the centre of the castle. It had a definite lean to it, but looked fairly intact. For some unknown reason someone had at some point carried old railway track up to the inside of the castle and laid it out in a line along the hillside, which lead out on a kind of wooden jetty and then ended in mid-air, causing one’s mind to immediately picture a cartoon train reaching the end of the track and hanging in the air for a few moments before plummeting into the lake below. Somehow it was strangely beautiful in the midst of the ruins, and combined the very Mediterranean feel of the North of Syria with a sense that we were part of a Western, and any minute some slightly futuristic steam punk creation might appear out of the ruins of the castle and put the tracks to use. Someone had laid a piece of track upright against the foot of the tower, and of course it was impossible for any of us to resist the challenge of climbing up the tracks like a giant ladder and from there entering the tower. After climbing the tracks with varying degrees of difficulty we made our way up the worn but sturdy spiral staircase the top of the tower, which was still mostly walled in, with four windows providing us with a beautiful 360 degree view of the lake and countryside, and spent some sitting high above the lake enjoying the breeze and the sun and the silence.

After our trip up the tower the boys went off to try and explore the underground rooms, while Becka and climbed out to the end of the train tracks where we could sit above the lake in the sun and just soak up the amazing atmosphere and enjoy the fact that we were the only people there. I felt like I could happily have sat there for hours, but after 15 minutes or so Everitte and Quintin came to get us, and told us that some strange men had come into the castle and started shouting at them that it was closed and we had to leave. We were somewhat surprised, as of course we knew it was closed, but had got the impression that that wasn’t much of a problem, however we made our way down to the waiting men, who seemed to have got over their anger, and escorted us out in silence before locking the door behind us. We only realised how lucky we had been to see it at all when we sat down to have tea in the café and two other groups turned up hoping to see the castle and were told it was impossible. The plump man had disappeared, and although we had intended to tip him for his trouble his car was gone so we wandered down to the lake to swim without having paid any money at all to see the castle, which made a nice change from paying too much for everything as a general rule.

We found a nice place to sit a little way along the road back towards the town, and left our bags on the rocks while we went swimming in the lake, which was lovely and cool and clear. Sadly the sun went in for about half an hour, just at the point where we were in the water, but it came out again when we got out and we sat on the rocks in the sun to dry off and eat biscuits, and I went in again for another swim in the sunshine while the other sat and relaxed in the sunshine. We ended up spending several hours sitting on the rocks with our legs in the water, and discovered that if we sat very still the little fish at the bottom of the lake would come and nibble the dead skin off our feet, which was a strangely soothing, if rather tickly, process. We all became a little bit addicted to the sensation, which was inexplicably satisfying, and ended up sitting for over an hour dangling our feet in the water for the fish, and watching them crowding around, sometimes four or five to a foot, and gradually cleaning our feet, until mine were skin-coloured rather than brown for the first time in months!

Just as we were beginning to talk about trying to find a way back to town we heard a call and looked up at the road to see the plump man, a little more red and sweaty than he had been that morning, pull up in his chauffeured car and get out. He saw us packing up our things and picking up all the many biscuit packets and asked if we wanted a lift back to town, which we gratefully accepted. He packed all our bags into the boot, and then beckoned me to the front seat. As there were five of us, including the driver, I assumed Becka and I would both share the front seat, but as soon as I sat down the plump man got in next to me, and gestured Becka and the boys into the back. He then proceeded to put his sweaty, chubby arm around my waist, as I sat perched between him and the driver, unable to move away from him as the poor driver was already having trouble changing gears as he kept hitting my leg. There was a large gun in the foot well which I had no choice but to rest my feet on and hope it wouldn’t blow a hole in my leg, and when we passed the police check point on the way back into town the man merely waved and drove straight through, which I suspect means he was some form of police or secret service. It took about 15 minutes to get back to town, and all the way he kept his arm around my waist, despite my obvious annoyance, and kept putting his red face very close to mine and asking me stupid questions. Becka and Everitte could see what was happening from the back, and kept asking loudly if I was okay, to which I replied I was too hot, and gestured at the tenaciously clinging arm, but to no avail. Becka told me afterwards that she was holding the big bottle of water, ready to smack his hand if it strayed anywhere it shouldn’t have. We had said we were planning to head on to Aleppo, and the driver actually chased down the Aleppo bus and stopped it for us just outside town, meaning that in the end we saved a lot of time and money, but despite this, and the fact that it was also thanks to the chubby man that we got to see the castle, we didn’t give him a tip, just said goodbye and boarded the bus, as we were all so annoyed at his behaviour. I didn’t really know how to feel afterwards, as on one hand he hadn’t actually done anything other than put his arm around me, but on the other hand I felt a little bit like a prostitute, exchanging a grope in a car for a free lift.

In spite of all this it was a very enjoyable day, and I would not have missed wandering through the deserted castle and climbing the crumbling tower, or sitting being nibbled at by tiny fish for anything. Quala’at Jaba’a is definitely one of my favourite places in Syria, and a strong contender for the winner of the best castle out of the four we saw on our six day trip!

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