The Road to Damascus and other stories.

---

Once upon a time, in a land far, far, away, a young Jewish fundamentalist was heading up to Damascus to kill other Jews for not believing in their God in the right way. Everybody needs a hobby. While on the way there, he was suddenly struck blind by a bright light from God himself and heard a voice telling him that he had it all wrong. He was so impressed by this that when he got his sight back he immediately changed his name by one letter, to “Paul” (as in “St Paul”) and began to travel the known world preaching the Christian message of intolerance and self-loathing. This is where we today get the phrase “A road to Damascus experience”. Thankfully nothing like this happened to me on the road to Damascus when I went there nineteen hundred years later and in a different universe - the universe of things that actually happened - which is a Good Thing, because while falling to the ground from a donkey is quite a different proposition than falling to the ground from a bus that’s travelling at 90 kph. Not only did I not fall to the ground, but it was two weeks and another country before I got blind, and even then it was more like just a bit tipsy. Perhaps it’s because I took a different route, coming in from the North rather than the Southwest as he probably did.

---

I was in Damascus only for one full day a while ago, I think it was June 16. I’ll put this, and the first few days in Amman, up as a separate blog, so that I can do a different blog for the archaeology stuff I’m doing in Wadi Araba, Jordan. As most of you know I don’t have Internet access on the archaeology survey, other than when we go into civilization on our days off. For this reason I’m way behind on my blogs. I’m actually having a hard time remembering what I did in Damascus it’s so long ago. I’m writing this offline on June 29, but it will probably be nearly a week before I can publish it on my blog.

---

So in the last blog I was travelling on the bus from Antakya to Damascus. The journey was fairly uneventful. I was a bit worried about the visa situation, because as regular readers know, when I was in Beijing I tried very hard to get a Syrian visa but was unsuccessful, and all the official sources say that you shouldn’t really get a visa at the border. There was even a sign at the border saying something in Arabic and something in English along the lines of people should have a visa already, and that only people from countries without a Syrian embassy should get visas at the border. This is clearly silly for a couple of reasons which you all realise since you’re all intelligent people. Well, most of you. However everyone told me I was OK and I made it clear to the guys in the bus, hoping that I wouldn’t hold them up too much. In the end it was no problem really. They charged me $US 70, I think it was, bundled me back and forth between about five different officials, including one important-looking guy in a private office, none of whom said or did anything other than flick through our passports looking for Israeli stamps. It seemed pretty much the same for the locals and for the only other tourists on the bus, a Quebecoise couple who already had a visa. So I made it into Syria, which “could just be the friendliest, most hospitable, rogue state on earth”, to quote Lonely Planet. In the end they stamped my passport with a weird Arabic stamp with the only English words being the wonderfully politically incorrect sentence: “WHEN HE WANTS TO STAY MORE THAN 15 DAYS HE MUST REFER TO THE BRANCH OF IMMIGRATION”, which made me think.

Also, fifteen days is short for a visa, especially one for which you pay $US 70. In Damascus, a ship passing in the night told me that Aussies coming in by land from Lebanon can get a Syrian visa at the border for only $US 30. Since I was only in country for a total of about 48 hours, I should have been able to get a cheaper transit visa but I didn’t realise that until later and even if I had I doubt it would have worked since they didn’t speak much English.

I stayed at a Backpackers in pretty much the heart of old Damascus. It was a nice building, supposedly something like 600 years old, with the world’s least helpful staff. One of them just didn’t give a rat’s, and the other one had a temper like, well, a Syrian. At night a couple of locals would come there to smoke nargilehs (hookahs), I don’t know why, I guess once upon a time it was something else. Both nights I was there there was some senile old man puffing on a nargileh with a few younger people looking after him. At one point he began stomping his feet and calling something in Arabic. A middle aged man whom he obviously knew well came down and tried to console him at which point he swung out violently with his wooden cane, almost hitting his head.

I spent the first evening trying to update my blog, for the last entry you all know and love so well. Between Syria’s censorship (all Wikipedia images are blocked, plus of course youtube and facebook, and all the anonymous proxies so you can’t get around it the way you would in China) and Travelblog’s amazingly disgusting level of service, took many hours even though I had the text written. Seriously if someone knows any other software that can do blogs this way (including photos in them) then let me know, even if I have to host it myself. I’d prefer to not host it myself though without the time to fiddle with it. I played with WordPress but there didn’t seem to be a way to integrate photos like I can here. At least Travelblog doesn’t seem to read what I write about them At least none of you complained that half the photos are missing and that many of them are there twice.

Anyway. So the next day I walked around the souqs for a while, went to a mosque and got lost in the old city. That’s about it for Damascus. I kind of like how souqs and even cities in general seem to have all the shops of one type in one area. This is fun when you’re wandering around and all of a sudden find yourself surrounded by stores which sell kitchenware, but kind of sucks if you’re actually looking for something, say a knife, and all you can find is women’s burqas or nargilehs.

I think the Mosque I went to is the Umayyad Mosque, one of the central points of the town. I wandered around in here for quite a while, the central courtyard was quite impressive, and it’s a fair place to people watch, with all sorts of people here, including teenagers running around in the centre near the ablution fountain, large tour groups, and a few tourists. Everyone has to take their shoes off, obviously a common practice in Mosques which I believe started as a practical point (no-one wants to kneel to pray with the shoes of the guy in front sticking in their face) but now seems more customary. Women have to cover their heads so the tourists seemed to get given weird brown hooded jackets which made them look a bit like some kind of weird colour-blind Ku Klux Klan imitators.

After a while wandering around here I tried to head back to where I was staying, but since I’d followed some people there before heading off by myself, I forgot the way. I had a city map but it was quite useless since it was in English only and pretty much all the street names, such as there were, were in Arabic only, and the streets were too curvy to be able to work out where one was from their shape alone. I ended up walking back and forth up the same street a couple of times, three times passing the guy who appeared to have no legs or body, just head and arms, on a little thing like a skateboard, playing with his mobile phone, past the public meeting with people in traditional clothes filing in to hear what apparently was a Muslim cleric of some sort. Eventually I worked out that I had to turn left at some stage, and that was easier. I paid a couple of dollars for a dinner which apparently was some kind of kebab, but actually involved five “kebabs” like sausages, five plates of various salads, and about six pieces of flat bread. The only downside of it was that it took them an hour to prepare for me.

I’d expected a lot of women with their heads covered, and there were, but I didn’t see any with a grill for their eyes. Most had their faces exposed, although a few had something where they pull the sides of the burqa across their face, forming a V shape which only leaves their eyes and nose exposed. A few, had their entire head covered, but what I assume was fabric which is thin enough to see out of but not to see in through. This looked weird, as if they were walking backwards. A few of the younger women wore western-style clothes, such as jeans and a long blouse, but almost always with long sleeves. Men tended to dress fairly modestly, but contrary to what I’d heard, a lot of them wore short sleeves, so I guess they do have the right to bare arms (boom boomb!). I didn’t discover the Christian section, where apparently things are much more “modern”.

So the next day I headed off to Amman, in Jordan. I read somewhere that there was a bus at 07:00 and that they fill up quickly, so I left at about 06:00 for the bus station. On getting there and avoiding all the people trying to get me to take a “service taxi” I found that the ticket counter would only open at 08:00 and the bus would leave at 08:30. Service taxis are like “Outstation taxis” in some parts of the world, long-distance taxis which cost marginally more than busses and cram as many people as they can into their taxi, only leaving when they’re full. A bus sounds more comfortable, particularly since the one I was on was about three-quarters empty.

On this bus I met a British couple who’d been staying in Cairo with friends for some weeks and had popped up through Jordan into Amman for a few days. They were intending to get as far as Aqaba that night and then take the ferry across to Egypt the next day. I still hadn’t really got used to dealing with geographically small countries, so it still seemed slightly surprising to me that one could go most of the way across Syria and all the way across Jordan in one day, but they said that it would be easy to get another bus from Amman to Aqaba when we arrived, which should be about 14:00, “Insha’allah” they said.

The customs process entering Jordan was simpler, probably because there were less people. The customs officials spoke English. So I went from seeing photos of the young blue-eyed (unofficially) hereditary President of Syria everywhere to seeing photos of the young blue-eyed (half-British) king of Jordan, or rather, photos of him when he was younger.

We arrived in Amman and I managed to get a taxi driver who didn’t rip me off and spoke English. Everybody in Jordan speaks English, except the taxi drivers, so it’s just like back home. Almost all the road signs, and many signs on shops, are in Arabic and English. For a non-English-speaking country, the level of English is impressive.

In Amman I met up with one of the guys going on the archaeology survey. With almost two days to spare, we visited the Dead Sea on the first day, and explored Amman on the second day.

I’d known that one is more boyant in the Dead Sea, which by the way is shrinking, so unless someone does something, it’ll soon be the really dead sea. We went with a driver organized by the hotel, there were supposed to be two others going with us but they canceled at the last moment, but we still got a cheap deal. The worst part was that they took us to a beach which charged 12 JD (almost $AUS 20) entry. I forgot my bathers, so I had to buy another pair there and they charged me 5 JD (about $AUS 9) for them and they fell apart as soon as I’d finished swimming, so that was a waste of money. I’d expected to be much more buoyant in the Dead Sea, which I was, and I wasn’t surprised that the water stung the eyes and nose like crazy, but I wasn’t expecting the strange feeling in one’s stomach when one gets into the water. It was like the opposite of being in a lift, when it stops at one’s floor. It’s a rather strange feeling, and I’m pretty sure it’s not just the mental thing about one not sinking as quick as one would expect. It’s also kind of weird to see bits of salt floating about the place and salt bars instead of beaches in some places. Even if you want to risk pain in your eyes and nose, it’s impossible to duck-dive under, but by pushing myself out of the water as far as I could and letting myself drop, repeatedly, I eventually managed to get all of my body under water for an instant. It would have been easier if I hadn’t had to use one hand to cover my face to prevent any water getting into my nose or near my eyes. It’s something one probably has to see, otherwise it’s not such a great experience.

On the way there we stopped at Mt Nebo, where the local desert god of a small tribe of savages gave Moses his only look at the Promised Land after telling him that after journeying to it for twenty years he wasn’t going to get to actually go into it because God was still mad at Moses for a sin he did twenty years earlier, when he hit a rock twice when God only told him to hit it once. Hopefully for his sake, Moses had a better view than we did, because it was quite hazy, and while I could just make out the river Jordan, I couldn’t see any milk and honey. It is of course called the “Promised Land” because one day when his assistant was taking a sickie, God accidentally promised the land to three different groups who hated each other, and the rest is history.

This Mt Nebo is the real site, we went there, and know that it’s the real site because it was authenticated by no other than Pope John Paul II. There’s a little museum there and part of the hill is blocked off because there’s still a functioning, small, convent there. We passed the sign to the putative site where Jesus for some obscure reason thought it would be a good idea to get baptized, which apparently is a bit of a tourist attraction, but by that time our driver was in a hurry to get home.

That night at the hotel I met a middle-aged British woman wearing long sleeves, a long skirt and a head scarf. She’d worked in various countries in the Middle East for some years, so I thought she was just taking the cultural sensitivity thing to extremes, but when she said something like “You know there are lots of doubts about the theory of evolution” it fell into place. She was a British lady who had seen flaws with Christianity when she was younger and had seen converting to Islam as the best way around this. Unfortunately while she asserted that there were many miraculous things in the Quran, despite having been a Muslim for some thirty years she couldn’t tell me what they were. When she asked why I didn’t believe in Islam, she didn’t recognise any of the surahs I talked about when I pointed out that there is a lot of nasty stuff in the Quran, and came back with the excuse that they were probably translated wrong. This is a big problem for Muslims, that because they don’t believe in reading the Quran in translation, most of them have no idea what it actually says, even if they can chant bits of it in ancient Arabic.

The next day we wandered around the old city of Amman, taking in the Nymphaeum; a well-restored Roman Theatre, from the days when Amman was Roman Philadelphia; and the Citadel, where the Pillars of Hercules are located. The citadel contains some Umayyad-era palaces and other Islamic era buildings. My camera battery died around here, so I don’t remember much of it. We also had a fairly good view from here of the Jordanian flag of the Raghadan Palace complex which according to Lonely Planet is the largest freestanding flagpole in the world (North Korea has a larger flagpole near its border with South Korea to give them some kind of Freudian inferiority complex, but to quote Lonely Planet “that one is supported by cables, which, as everyone knows, is cheating”). Since we climbed up through back streets and up a small walking track, and a bit of a hill climb, we came into the Citadel area without going through the front entrance, which means we never ended up paying. I think the entrance fee was only a couple of dollars anyway.

So that evening, the day before the Archaeology survey began, most of us volunteers met up at the American Centre for Oriental Research, and went out to some fancy restaurant, enjoying a massive meal of various small dishes and a few puffs on a nargileh, like all the locals. Because most of my travels have been in countries where, at least in the traditional areas, the only women who smoke are hookers, I still find it strange here in the Middle East, as in Turkey, to see everyone smoking all over the place, including for example Imams and their wives, and other traditional women in burqas.

---

So assuming that I’ll only get to publish this blog entry on Sunday, July 5, it will be over two weeks behind. As you’ll know I’m on a four-week archaeology survey. It’s fun, and I’ve written up a blog entry about the first week, but I don’t have much time on the Internet, so won’t be able to upload it this weekend, it’ll have to wait until next weekend. I’m also not quite sure how to write it, since as you’ll have noticed, I tend to avoid writing about people with too much detail, at least people who might read it. But I’ll work something out.

---

Photos

Amman
Pillars of Hercules

Amman
Islamic evangelical grafitti ?

Amman
Citadel area with the world's largest free-standing flagpole in the background.

Amman
me at Mt Nebo gazing out across the "Promised Land". This is what Musa (Moses) might have looked like. :-)

Dead Sea
me floating in the Dead Sea