Athens to Damascus

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Days 21-24 (Thur 15th - Sun 18th Feb):
I spent these few days in Athens where I went through the necessary procedures to get my syrian visa, this including getting a letter from the British Consulate, which cost 65 Euros! The actual visa cost 42 Euros, so at a total cost of 107 Euros as well as the effort spent getting it, I just had to hope that it would be worthwhile!
Kurt was still in the hostel and we went out for a meal one night. On another night I spent the evening with two Japanese girls, Toko and Nosomi, and a French woman, Juliet, who invited me to try some of the sea-urchins she had caught that day. When I saw that the spiny creatures were still alive I protested against eating them without killing them first, but eventually came around to the idea that a relatively simple organism probably had a very crudely developed nervous system, and no consciousness as we know it. So when Juliet cut them in half I allowed myself to eat one, and found it to be very soft and quite tasty; a little salty, but not too much.
With the urchin-eaters I visited the Benaki museum, which has a wide selection of artefacts from many parts of the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and Egypt, with some items, such as pottery and gold jewellery in surprisingly good condition, being over 7000 years old! Also there was a very interesting exhibition there which consisted of photographs and a film about the mass-migration of greeks to America from 1890 and well into the twentieth century.
I also visited Athens's Archaeology Museum, which is considered to be one of the best in the world, and saw artefacts many of which were of similar age and condition to those in the Benaki museum.
On the evening of Sunday 18th February I took a ferry not to Rhodes but to Hios, another greek island close to Turkey. (24 Euros).

Day 25 (Mon 19th Feb):
I was woken at about 4am by an announcement that the ferry was approaching the port at Hios. Having always had to wait for a long time to disembark from previous ferries I got up from my place on the carpet and took my time in the bathroom and getting my stuff together. When I then found my way to the ferry's exit I discovered that it was shut and we were moving again! Was I going to end up back at Athens?! One explanation from a crewmember later I was enjoying another two hours kip before arriving at Mitilini on the island of Lesvos, or Lesbos. I spent the day there, looking around the castle and buying supplies from small shops, and at 6pm I took a ferry back to Hios (14 Euros) where I found a room near the harbour (15 Euros).

Day 26 (Tue 20th Feb):
At 8am I took a ferry to Cesme (25 Euros), bought my visa (15 Euros) and I was officially in Turkey. Getting off the ferry I had got talking to Silvain and Asana, he french and she romanian, both about my age, and they offered me a lift to Ephesus. They lived together in Bucharest and talked easily and seemed like instant good friends.
At Ephesus I bought a cheap film camera as up to that point I had travelled without one. A film camera is little good for this blog though I know!
Ephesus is the site of an Ionian town built a few centuries B.C. (for more info, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephesus) I explored it with Sylvain and Asana and we saw its impressively large amphitheatre, and the restored 'Library' which is a building with a facade of columns supporting decorated lintels which, in turn, support more columns, and their lintels. Also of great interest was a previously buried area of houses which were being restored beneath a large semi-permanent protective canopy. The houses mostly had beautiful mosaic floors in excellently preserved condition, and colourful murals on many of the walls depicting people and animals.
Silvain and Asana were then driving into rural Turkey, and so they dropped me off at about 5pm in Selcuk, the nearest significant town to Ephesus, to try to find a bus to Adana. At Selcuk's bus station I found myself in the hands of the jovial Turks. They told me that there was a bus to Adana straight away and I must act quickly, but as I had been in places before where several bus companies compete with one another to get you on their bus I had come across this panic trick before and so I didn't believe them. However, it turned out that this time they were telling the truth and one of them had actually phoned the driver of a bus which had just left and asked him to stop. Within seconds I was on the back of a speeding motorbike, my bag across the rider's lap, racing towards a waiting bus (cost: 17 TKL = 9 Euros).

Day 28 (Wed 21st Feb):
Having spent the night on the bus, I arrived in Adana, on the south coast of Turkey, at about 7am. I had a breakfast of Kebab meat with some kind of sliced giant radish and jalepeno peppers in a place adjoining the bus station, and then, with the help of the continuously laughing and joking Turks working there I got on a bus to Kilis, a small town close to the Syrian border. I was there by mid morning and on asking for and paying for a bus into Syria I found that I had in fact paid for a taxi. For a while I felt that I'd been cheated into paying more money for a taxi rather than getting a bus (the taxi was 40 TKL = 22 Euros), but when we got to the first border control gate and waited for about an hour while other vehicles joined the queue, I noticed that there weren't any buses, so perhaps the taxi was the only option after all. It felt like I was in another country even at that point as the border was in a bleak, windy and desolate desert landscape. There was nothing there as far as the eye could see except dust. And Turkey had been relatively green.
Following the long drawn out process of waiting around at two border posts (Jordan exit and Syria entry) we began driving into Syria. The first thing I noticed, apart from the dust, was the litter. There was so much of it that it spread across the fields; plastic bags blowing in the wind as far as the horizon! The second thing I noticed was that Concrete is King. Every building was of concrete, but unlike the Greeks or the Turks who tend to face their buildings with brick, or paint them, here it was just left as it was: Every building was grey. A desert land with very basic grey buildings scattered about. This was Syria. As we passed through the occasional small town I often saw cars from the 1960s such as Pontiacs and some french models, and the driving was all new too; this was a country where if people aren't going very far they don't bother to get over to the correct side of the road!
Despite a few seemingly near misses on the road, we arrived in Aleppo at about 3pm and I transferred to a local taxi to get me to the bus station. My driver was much more talkative than the previous one who, despite my best efforts, had barely spoken. Like the previous one, he didn't know a word of english, and of course, I didn't know a word of arabic, but it didn't matter; we talked at each other and I listened hard and began to grasp what some of the words he was saying probably meant. I am sure that if you continued doing this you could learn a language this way. His name was Mohammed and I correctly thought, 'I bet that's not the last person I meet with that name!'
At the bus station I managed to communicate that I wanted a bus to Damascus and paid in Euros (3). This bus ride became very interesting as I sat at the front and became involved in attempted conversation with the driver's mate, a lad in his twenties. He didn't speak a word of English, but when I indicated that I would like to learn to count in Arabic he became very enthused. There followed an intense lesson in Arabic numbers, as well as the days of the week, with the lad insisting that I pronounce each word just right, and repeat everything again and again. The passengers in the seats around me found it very amusing and also became involved in the molarchy, while the driver spoke a few words of english to say of his mate: He is a donkey!
Thus by the end of the day, by the end of over 24 hours of practically continuous travelling in fact, I was in the capital of Syria where, thanks to yet another taxi driver, I found a hotel room (about 10 Euros).

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