Syria and Lebenon

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Well, we are nearly at the end of out trip, we fly out of Istanbul on Thursday. We have not had nearly long enough here, only really in Jordan and Syria did we feel that we had seen enough. We decided not to spend much time here in Turkey as we would only get frustrated at not being able to see what we want, we'll just have to come back again!

Anyway, what have we done since the last blog. We left Jordan and travelled to Damascus, Syria. We spent about 36 hours there, enough to see what we wanted to see. We spent a long morning going round the old city, round the mosque and the neat, narrow back streets. We had a lovely breakfast of these flat bread things with a cheese and egg topping, baked
fresh in front of us. Colin tried an Arabic coffee, as most of you will know, its like sludge! We also wandered round the National Museum. From Damascus we crossed over into Lebanon, going straight to Beirut. Lebanon is quite a small country and the places that we had time to see we all easily accessable on a day trip from Beirut. We went to the Roman ruins at Baalbek, small but very impressive, pretty complete temples, mosaics, huge colunms... We went out to one of the oldest continually occupied "towns" in the world, Byblos (Jbeil in Arabic), there were remains of various civilisations dating back 8000 years. Of course, much of the remains looked the same, we cant tell the difference between a bit of wall from 8000
years ago, and a bit of wall from 6000 years ago, we had to rely on the signs. The Roman, Crusader and Arabic stuff was pretty easy to identify though. On the way back to Beirut from there, we stopped at this small river gorge, in English its called Dog River, where successive invaders have left inscriptions on the rock walls. These arent any old graffitti, but huge pieces of rock face smoothed over, and carved into people and writings, from Ramses II through
Assyrian kings right up to British and French troops in both the world wars.

Beirut was an interesting city. The downtown area is in the process of major rebuilding works, and what they have finished already is brilliant. But there are still huge numbers of buildings with damage ranging from bullet holes to bomb blasts, some still lived in (like our hostel) to those condemned. A number of Roman ruins have been unearthed during the
knocking down and rebuilding process, and these are now on display with the new buildings around them. Lebanon, and particularly Beirut, is not an obviously Arab country, there are many other churches, the Sunday we were at Byblos, all we heard was church bells ringing, not the muslim call to prayer. The people there look quite southern European, in manners
and dress. On our second evening wandering around Beirut, we were surprised at the increased number of troops on the streets, due apparently to a francophonie conference starting the following week. Also due to this conference, the marines (?) were staging a exercise along the waterfront. This involved some of them crouching behind palm trees, some running from town towards the waterfront, then all of them running to the RIB's and taking off into the harbour. All of this while us civilians wandered around them, some people were even filming it all. The whole thing looked more like a tacky movie than any kind of serious exercise, but the threat of terrorist action is always there.

From Lebanon we came back into Syria, to a town called Hama, which we used as a base for more exploring of more castles and Roman ruins. The two mains places we visited were Krak des Chevaliers, a crusader castle in a very good state of repair, and the huge Roman city of Palmyra, out in the desert. The krak was a smallish castle, but would have been very hard to
successfully invade, the inner walls were 25m thick at the base. A Syrian tv series on Genghis Khan was being filmed while we were there. Palmyra looks like a forest of columns from a distance, once you get closer you can make out more detail, although there are a lot of column there. we went round some tombs, the main temple, and a few lesser temples. There is enough to keep you busy all day, much of the site has yet to be excavated and gets quite hard to walk around. We took a bus tour through the Dead Cities finishing in Aleppo, where we got another bus to Turkey. An overnight stop in Antakya, and two more bused to Goreme, Cappadocia, where we are now. Its also suddenly gotten cold.

We are about to go off walking in the valleys around Goreme, looking at all the weird rock formations.

Hopefully this will get to you all, the internet connections here are dodgy at the best of times, and I have a feeling that we have been disconnected since I started writing this, so fingers crossed that this gets saved so I can post later!

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Photos

Stelae at the mouth of the Nahr-al-Kalb
Or in English, Dog River. The older stelae (including some from Ramses II and similar aged Assyrina Kings) didnt photograph well due to wear and light.