Crac de Chevaliers

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The next morning we found that more than half the group had got food poisoning from the meal the night before. Luckily my fussy-ness meant that I escaped and I went out to find another fruit juice from the nearby bar.

We caught a bus down to Hama with people being sick every so often. Not a great journey, but I was very glad I had avoided the bug. To get us in the mood for our destination we watched "Kingdom of Heaven" as we travelled south. I couldn't hear much of it, but it certainly got me in the right frame of mind.

Having unloaded the most sickly people at the hotel we went on to the Crac de Chevaliers. This was quite impressive and large. Our tour leader was fairly good as a guide, which was useful because there were few signs around to indicate which structure was which. He took us through and along the outer curtain wall before entering the keep itself. For some reason I had envisaged (at university) that it was perched on a cliff in the middle of a desert, but in reality it was surrounded by farmland. Quite a bit of restoration work had been done in some areas, but it was still largely intact. There was a bit of haze and smog in the air, so we could not see the next Crusader castle clearly, but we could see enough to recognise how the castle guarded a vital route through the hills between the coast and the inland plains.

Having finished the tour of the castle, those of us feeling well enough had a proper lunch at a nearby restaurant (which had excellent views of the castle). After that we returned to the hotel in Hama and I tried to sort out my bank issues. No success but at least I was feeling well while most people went to bed for 12 hours.

Those of us who remained awake had an interesting chat with our tour leader who had been telling us about Muslim culture every night. We then played uno which was quite entertaining for a while.

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Comments

[mum]

uno
For those of us with no idea: what on earth is uno?