Into the desert

---

We had a "free morning" to explore the town of Hama. Unfortunately I still needed to sort out my money so spent the time in an internet cafe and then persuaded the tour guide to sort out a pay phone for me. Good job he did because (a) I could not find it (it was on the wall in the street outside a shop) and (b) to get it to work I needed a chap to fish coins out of the coin box and then feed them back in to the slot while I discussed the issue, at length, with my bank. However, after much wrangling they unlocked it and I quickly withdrew some cash to last the whole holiday... before more suspicious transactions appeared.

After this it was nearly midday and our agreed meeting time to catch a bus into eastern Syria to Palmyra.
The coach was fairly comfortable and there was no sickness from other members of the tour. The desert was, well, pretty sandy and barren. I'd never been through one before so I enjoyed the trip. We reached Palmyra just before dusk and checked into our hotel.

Our tour leader (who seems to be a celebrity in Syria because he has the same name as the president) had detected that Uno was something we enjoyed, so we had an hour long session that got semi-acrimonious when husband/wife couples got one-another in trouble. Funny nonetheless. We then had a meal in a rather quirky restaurant that doubled as an internet cafe. The decor was an atrocious blend of different things from different places, but somehow it worked.

---