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Published: January 26th 2006
Ummayad Mosque, Damascus
Mosaics on one of the pavillions in the courtyard.Damascus is the oldest inhabited capital city in the world, at least according to the Syrian Tourist Office. They also claim that Syria (well at least ‘geographical Syria’ - i.e. including Palestine, Israel, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan and large parts of Turkey) is the origin of all culture, agriculture, language, civilisation, writing, and just about everything else, so I’m not sure how true this really is. Aleppo also claims to be the oldest inhabited city in the world - again a contentious claim, and there is apparently a fair bit of rivalry between the 2 cities over which is the oldest. I was also told there is a similar competition over which is the craziest, but Aleppo wins hands down on this one. Whilst there are parts of central Damascus around the old city that are pretty crazy it is nothing approaching the hectic madness of Aleppo, and so Damascus seems a much nicer, cleaner, more relaxed place. The streets are wider, even in the souq, the air seems cleaner (or maybe we are just getting used to the pollution), there are more fancy buildings, and in the old city there is hardly any traffic at all.
The city has a
very Middle Eastern feel to it again after Beirut, with Islamic style architecture in abundance, even on more modern buildings in the downtown area. The old city is surrounded by ancient walls which date back to biblical times or earlier - these are the very same walls that St. Paul was lowered over in his basket, and within the old city many of the streets have carried the same names for millennia. It is quite weird to be walking down a street that is named in the bible.
It took Ben and us 2 days to reach Damascus from Beirut, despite it only being just over 100km or so. The 1400m climb up over the Lebanon mountain range from Beirut was killer and my bike barely survived it. The road starts to climb steeply before you have even properly left the city and we were soon working hard and breathing deeply, getting lungfuls of disgusting diesel fumes from the busy road with lots of trucks and buses. Lebanon has recently banned foreign diesel vehicles from the entering the country, and we were soon wishing they had banned them entirely. Stopping for a rest we looked back to see the
The Bekaa Valley, Lebanon
On the road out of Chtaura, the best thing about the town. main part of the city and the docks spread out below us, and tried to estimate how far we had climbed. This is never a good thing to do though unless you are in sight of the top, and we all knew it was still a long, long way up. The road continued to climb steeply and the traffic remained bad all the way up. The views got better and this made up for the noise and fumes to a degree. After about 3 hours we collapsed into a falafel shop for some food and tea. After re-fuelling the owner told us we were at 1000m and this cheered us up a fair bit.
It was still slow going and hard work after this though, and we soon had to stop again as Bens rear wheel fell off! At least it happened on the way uphill at a slow pace, but he was cursing the guy who had serviced his bike in Beirut and not replaced it properly. My back wheel also felt a bit wobbly so we checked it was fitted tight, which it was, and assumed it just needed some more air in the tyre. After another hour
Arabian Oryx, Talila reserve
Apparently the legendary unicorn, although I think someone had dodgy eyesight or couldnt count very well...... or so we reached the snow line and plodded on up the side of a busy highway with trucks roaring past poisoning us on one side and a huge wall of slushy snow on the other. We finally reached the top to see a grey view across the Bekaa valley towards the Anti-Lebanon Mountains, which still lay between us and Damascus. My wheel felt even worse by now and a quick check revealed it had a lot of sideways play on it. Assuming there was something wrong with the hub I had to cycle slowly downhill into the Bekaa, though still fast enough to overtake many of the trucks that were crawling down the steep hill at a snail's pace.
We reached Chtaura freezing cold and hungry, and unsure what to do. We decided trying to continue over the next mountains into Syria with only 2 hours of daylight left would be foolish and so looked for a hotel as it was so cold. The only cheap hotel in town was not actually that cheap, and when we got in it was a total dump. We had to wait an hour for a heater as the only one was
being used by the other customers - who seemed only to be renting the room for the hour! It was still freezing in there for hours after we got the gas heater though, and a power cut only made things more depressing. We went out to get food to at least cook ourselves a decent meal, only to discover that Chtaura is basically a town sized motorway service station that doesn’t sell proper food. We managed to get just enough ingredients to cobble something together and stave off the hunger for the night. The only redeeming thing about the place was the hot shower in the hotel.
We woke in the morning after sleeping very well and Erika tried to light the heater. None of our collection of a dozen lighters would work. Ben got up had a go and found the same thing. None of the matches would work either. We couldn’t even light a candle, never mind our stove or the heater. Convinced they were doing something wrong I tried too, but a perfectly good lighter also wouldn’t work. I concluded the only explanation was that there was no oxygen in the room and we were all
Hands off Iraq
The poster by which we met our Iraqi friend. dead. We briefly contemplated that being stuck in this hotel in this town for the rest of eternity would seem an appropriate form for hell to take….. Ben went down to buy a new lighter. It worked in the shop, it worked in the hallway, but not in the room. We lit the candle outside and walked into the room with it and it went out. It would seem there really was no oxygen in the room yet we all felt fine and were breathing normally. Bizarre… We were glad we had woken up when we did though and not slept any longer….
After this we got outside fast and back on the bikes. It was a beautiful sunny day and we were glad to be alive and to get out of Chtaura. After a quick half hour pedal we arrived at the Lebanese exit post, at the bottom of the hill, and kicked ourselves for not pressing on yesterday. Now Erika and I knew we were 1-2 days over our visa, but hoped that they either wouldn’t notice or we could blag our way out of it. We had paid 25,000 lire for our 15 day visas while
Ben had been given a month for free! He went through and set off for Syria as he had no visa to get in there and we did. Sadly they spotted our expired visa immediately and we were sent to another office where we were shown to a back room and made to sit down on a bed with handcuffs on the rail at the end. Through a door behind us was a row of cells. Even more unfortunately the guy dealing with us spoke no English so our pre-prepared batch of excuses was never going to work. After being shown backwards and forwards for an hour or so and having to cough up another 50,000 lire each for a 3-month visa extension we were finally stamped out (they wouldn’t accept my offers to pay a ‘fine’ for only being a day late). They only considered we were a day late and so we were kicking ourselves even more for not having crossed the border the previous afternoon. The Lebanese-Syrian border is a bizarre thing as from this exit-post it was several miles through the snowy mountains before we came to the Syrian entrance post. No problems here and we
St Paul's Gate
The church built form the old city gate, close to where St Paul was lowered over the walls in a basket. found Ben waiting for us in a falafel bar in the sun - it had taken him 5 minutes to get his visa at the border.
The traffic was much lighter inside Syria and the roads smoother and wider, and we were happy to be back here and to see the various members of the Assad family looking down on us from the roadside every few miles, and from the back of every passing car. The road to Damascus went through more snow covered hills, dropped down and across a wide valley before climbing one last small hill to give us a view down over the smog-filled haze to the huge sprawl of the city below. Cycling into the city was breeze after Lebanon. I was at first surprised to see drivers actually stopping at red lights and obeying traffic signals etc. - one advantage of a dictatorship I suppose! We found the cheap, but very nice, backpacker hotels in a quiet back street right in the centre and collapsed; glad we had made it despite near suffocation, extortion and a wonky wheel. At least we weren’t blinded by lightening and the voice of the Lord…..
The next
Quneitra
The church is one of the few buildings to survive total destruction,though only an emptry shell remains. day was Hogmanay (aka new year’s eve) but before we could start celebrating I checked my wheel out properly and discovered my rim was totally cracked most of the way around, worn out from too much braking. We set out in search of decent bike shops but these are not in abundance in Damascus. The local bikes here are all 27” wheel jobs with double crossbars and rods instead of brake cables, though they are quite cool, especially with tasselled carpet style seat covers and the ridiculous amount of decoration many people give them. Failing to find anything decent we got back to the hotel to find Vincent & Maider had arrived - one of the French couples we were travelling with in Lebanon. The hotel does not allow drinking alcohol so we had to smuggle in some bottles of Arak (52% alcohol) for our party in our room, and the New Year was seen in with fine style.
We spent the next few days sightseeing around the old city and searching for a new rim. The souq of the old city is great, as is the Umayyad mosque, the third largest mosque in the world, which has the
Quneitra
A (former) residential area...... head of John the Baptist inside it. Erika was most excited by the whole St Paul thing and so we visited the church on the site of his conversion to Christianity (after spending years killing Christians) and another one built from the gate in the city walls where he was lowered over in basket to escape a similar fate himself. To the immediate north of the city is mountain where Eve is supposed to have taken refuge after Cain killed Abel, though it is now home to TV and mobile phone masts. I don’t know what it is about Damascus really, but it is probably my favourite city of the trip so far. It is very nice place to stop for a while and that is just what we have done. There are a lot of foreigners here learning Arabic and a lot of non-Syrians from elsewhere in the Arab world, especially Iraq. There is a mix of people from women dressed in fashionable western style clothes to others who are completely covered so that you cannot even see their eyes. Apparently the number of women choosing to do this has increased in recent years, not for religious reasons but
Desert Roads
On the way to Palmyra for political reasons, as this is a way of asserting some kind of anti-western stance in response to increased interference by the west in Syria and the region (at least this is what we were told). There are some good political banners around - see picture, including one that says “Stop Trading in Hariri Blood”. But nobody will really discuss anything openly here, probably for good reasons, so it is hard to tell how many ordinary citizens actually subscribe to these views or not. What is clear is that without fail people make a clear distinction between us, as citizens of an ‘aggressor state’, and our government. Despite them possibly having strong views against the US and UK governments we have consistently been made welcome in a way that no foreigners are ever welcomed in Britain. While looking at an Iraqi poster - see picture again - a guy came up and asked if we were interested in Iraq. He then introduced himself as an Iraqi and asked where we were from. Somewhat uncomfortably we told him, pointing to the bloodstained Union Jack on the poster, and he just smiled and said welcome. In fact he insisted on giving us
his phone number in case we had any problems or needed any help in Damascus, and could not have been friendlier if he tried.
While sightseeing and searching out bike parts we also met up with Helene and Romain, the other French couple we had stayed with in Lebanon, and had a farewell meal with them before they flew to Buenos Aires with their tandem (you can follow them on http://tandaventures.free.fr). We also met up with Amelie and Pilou again, the Belgians, and their van, and also met Dan (www.big-bike.co.uk), who had cycled from London and had heard about us being ahead of him in Istanbul. We took a day trip with Ben and Dan down to the ruined city of Quneitra in the Golan Heights, or what little of the Golan remains under Syrian control. The Golan Heights were seized by Israel during the 6-day war and the town of Quneitra was also occupied. It was given back to Syria in 1974 but not before the Israeli's evicted thousands of people and demolished the entire city, right down to destroying or removing every single fixture and fitting - every tap, pipe, electrical socket and light bulb. They presumably
wanted to ensure that the place was completely uninhabitable when they left, and they have done a pretty good job as today it is an open air museum as an exhibit of 'Zionist oppression'. In order to visit we first had to go to the Ministry of Interior to get permission. The Ministry is a quite smart suburban house that was presumably taken over by the government during one of the many coups, and was distinguished from the other houses on the street by the gang of plain clothes guy's outside toting huge machine guns. Permits secured we set off on the bus. The town is within a Un controlled buffer zone and as we entered this we had to pick up a 'guide', allegedly to prevent us stepping on landmines etc. but really just to make sure we don’t photograph anything they don’t want us to. The town itself is eerie and very discomfiting. The main street is lined with the empty and damaged shells or shops and business premises, which along with the church and mosque were pretty much the only buildings not completely levelled. All the residential areas are just fields of rubble, and broken, twisted concrete.
The phrase 'ghost town' doesn’t really do the place justice, but I couldn’t get the opening bars of The Specials song out of my head the whole time we were there.
We did eventually find a half decent rim and get my wheel re-built, and decided to test it out by cycling through the desert to Palmyra, an ancient outpost on the Silk Road by an oasis that has a ruined city, and is probably the most famous site in Syria. Leaving Damascus on a Friday morning meant we missed the worse traffic and had a quiet ride out through the suburbs and onto the main road towards Baghdad. This was quite busy with lots of Iraqi trucks. We loaded up with food and water at the last town before the 'desert' and set off thinking it would be miles before we saw civilisation again. This was a false idea though as there are fairly regular petrol stations and cafes, and the odd police or military post too. There are also a lot of Bedouin villages/camps along the way, in fact there was something at least every 5-6km along the road, so we ended up carrying far more water
Before
Inside the Talila reserve, where no grazing has occured for 10 years and the desert is not really desert. than we needed. The going was slow due to an easterly headwind but we finally turned off the Baghdad road late in the day to head north towards Palmyra, having been told it would rain and we could see two thunderstorms raging way out across the flat desert to the east. For most of the day we had been following a line of low hills eastwards, but now we turned north across a wide open plain and it really did feel like the middle of nowhere. We camped off the road by a dry riverbed, and by midnight the sky had cleared to reveal the most amazing star scene you could imagine. The next day dawned bright and we set off early as it was still 90 miles to Palmyra and we did not have enough food for another night in the desert. Fortunately the wind had lessened and we made good progress through a wide desert valley between two lines of hills. As we left this the wind returned and for 2 hours we had to battle hard again. We had thought that if anything went wrong we could rely on the Bedu for food, water and shelter, so
After
1km away from the previous photo, outside the reserve. It is grazed and it is desert. when we were flagged down by a Bedu shepherd we were surprised but happy to give him some of our water and food. He really couldn’t grasp the concept that we didn’t have any cigarettes though. I guess the middle of the desert is not the best place to have a nicotine addiction.
The last 70km really were empty and mostly flat barren desert but we flew across it at high speed and arrived at the ruins and oasis just as the sun was setting.
The ruins are really quite impressive although the constant harassment by touts and people trying to sell camel tours, postcard and all manner of tourist tat is quite annoying and unusual by Syrian standards. After the first day the realised we were not going to buy anything and left us alone. What makes the place so special is the awesome desert backdrop to the ruins, with the Islamic citadel on the hilltop behind the roman era colonnades and temples. We spent a couple of days wandering around the ruins and admiring the scenery, and also checking out the quite vibrant modern town that sits next to the ancient one. We spent my birthday there
Ma'alula
The Aramiac speaking village in the snowy hills north of Damascus and had a traditional Bedouin feast of mansaf to mark the occasion. We met another French couple travelling on a tandem - Nicolas and Celine (www.voyage-tandem.com) and spent a lot of time in the Spring Restaurant drinking free tea and chatting to Mohammed the manager who can speak about 6 languages all at a ridiculous speed. We also a met a Welsh family, with 4 kids, travelling to South Africa in a landrover. According to the museum the ancient Palmyreans spoke a dialect of Aramaic, of which traces have been found as far afield as England! The museum also has some mummies on display from some of the many tombs scattered around the nearby desert.
One day we cycled out to Talila Reserve where there is an Arabian Oryx and Gazelle re-introduction programme. We got to see the Oryx which are apparently the source of the unicorn legend, but the most interesting part was the lack of 'desert' within the reserve - it is green! After only 10 years of stopping grazing by sheep and camels an amazing amount of vegetation has regenerated and it is only when we saw this we realised how false and man-made the desert we had cycled across really is - it should be steppe grassland rather than desert. In the last 70 years most of the Bedouin have slowly become more settled and most now have trucks and pickups and keep far more sheep than they used to. Rather than moving on to new grazing when the vegetation is depleted they now import extra feed, with the result that the natural vegetation has all but disappeared. The difference is quite shocking.
Before leaving to head back to Damascus I spent an evening at an Arabic 'stag night' with lots of singing and dancing and music in the street, but no women and no alcohol. The drumming was very good though. On our last night our friend Mohammed's brother was married and I managed to join the 'party' driving around the streets of the town blasting horns to celebrate. I was on the back of a motorbike, the driver of which was trying to impress any watching girls by seeing how close he could come to actually killing us, which was pretty damn close on several occasions, but it was an excellent way to end our stay in Palmyra. After 9 days there we knew half the town by first names and were a bit sad to get the bus back to Damascus but keen to get moving again too.
Before cycling south from Damascus we took another bus ride out to the snow covered hills north of the city to the village of Ma'alula, one of 3 villages in Syria where the Aramaic language is still spoken. This was the language of Jesus and only around 18,000 people still speak it as a first language, though they all speak Arabic too. It exists only as a spoken language, although they are trying to rediscover the written form. This kind of puts the Welsh language 'crisis' in perspective. The village is surrounded by cliffs on 3 sides and is the site where St. Tecla, an early Christian convert, escaped from Christian-hunters by running up against the cliffs and praying to god to rescue her. The story goes that a passage through the cliffs then opened and she was saved. You can walk through this narrow gorge - it is only 2-3m wide and quite deep, though the stream flowing through the bottom does suggest an alternative creation method. We also went to a convent and heard a woman recite the Lord's Prayer in Aramaic, in the same words that Jesus himself would have spoken. It sounded like Arabic at first but when she taught us some specific words it was actually quite different, and possibly even closer to Hebrew. The views across the snow covered hills were spectacular but it was freezing, and so far our plan to escape winter by going to the Middle East has not been very successful. It was time to get back on the bikes and head south to Jordan.
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Kate
non-member comment
Helloooo!
Hi both, good to hear from you, and I'm really glad you escaped death from suffocation. Dave reckons it might be carbon dioxide rather than carbon monoxide build-up in the room, so thats probably why you aren't dead!!! Interesting news today with Hamas winning the elections in Palestine. You certainly are in the hotbed of middle eastern politics at the moment. But as you say people seem to be able to distinguish between the governments and normal people who despise what said governments are doing. Good luck with spreading the word that not all people from the UK agree with the government here. Things in Kendal don't change very much, I don't think there is much gossip to be passed on. You two are both missed though, its great catching up with you through the blogs. xxxKate