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Published: April 28th 2010
It took me a while to find Resafe, the road sign was stuck away between some buildings. When I stopped to check my map, I was ofcourse invited to drink some coffee again, this time by a farmer and a visiting vet. They didn't speak any Englsih, but that's never a huge problem in Syria. They pointed me in the right direction, and I soon found the right road.
Resafe is an old city burried in the middle of the desert. Yes, hot and dusty, dusty and hot. It's a weird place. The walls are still mostly there, but a lot inside is burried under metres of sand. There are some huge halls, of which only the top sticks out even though they must be at least 10 metres high.
When you go to Resafe, you take a well travelled road off the highway between Al Raqqa and Deir al Zour. The most logical choice to get to Deir al Zour after visiting Resafe is to head back to the highway, but you can also take a detour and cross the desert to another highway further south. And I figured there's roads, so how hard can it be?
Crater landscape
All the craters you see have been dug by bedouins looking for treasure. I didn't find any.Quite hard, as a matter of fact. Riding in circles for hours, more or less. But the desert is a great place to get lost in. Once in a while a few dusty bedouin tents or an oil refinery, for the rest just sheer emptyness. When my low petrol warning light started burning I decided I'd had enough fun, and used my GPS to navigate to the only road that was actaully on the map in the GPS. I think I must have driven at least 150 km lost in the desert only to end up about 30 kms further up the northern highway to Deir al Zour again. No worries, no hurries, it was great.
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