Damascus to Amman

---

We left Damascus at a reasonably early time on Friday morning. This was good; the traffic was quiet as it was Friday and we headed off towards where we thought our road towards Swayda lay. Unfortunately this road was not marked on our map and after asking a few people for directions we were completely lost somewhere near the airport. Eventually we found the right road and realised that we had cycled about 5 miles too far! Any way as soon as we found the right road a blasting cold wind pummelled us from the south. Our friend Ben had emailed us earlier saying that it had taken him 5 days to get to Amman from Damascus because of strong headwinds and we were now facing the brunt of them for ourselves.

But we were happy to be on the bikes again, we kept a cheerful outlook and battled on at 8 mph into the winds. The road took us slowly south across a flat and wide rocky desert plain strewn with black basalt rocks. At some points in the day the winds flung across us and we were both cycling leaning over at an angle of about 25 degrees praying that there was not a sudden lull which would mean we would topple over.

By lunch time we had done almost 40-miles and were quite surprised by this, however with the same effort normally we would have gone much further. We stopped in a small village shop for lunch and bought hummus bread and tomatoes. The shop keeper then invited us to eat our lunch in his house and proceeded to serve our hummus with his own olive oil and gave us labneh (a kind of curd cheese) and cooked us eggs and gave us tea. We felt happy to be so well looked after and ate well happy to be out of the wind.

We set off determined to get to Shabaa and camp somewhere between that and Swayda, but the weather was getting even worse. The winds got stronger and we realized that we did not have any fuel, so had to keep going to find a petrol station. Eventually we found one and dived into it to be welcomed with coffee but told that they only sold diesel. We can burn diesel but the stove works much better on unleaded and after the terrible fuel we had picked up on the way out to Palmyra we pressed on the find the petrol. However it started to rain and get really stormy looking. It was at this point when we had stopped in a bus stop to put on waterproofs and I had accepted that we needed some help and run back to a shop to ask where we could camp (we were hoping for an offer of somewhere behind a wall so we could shelter from the wind), that a truck pulled up and a man jumped out and said "you stay in my house, 50 metres" up there. Gladly we accepted his offer and we were shown into the front room and treated like honoured guests for the rest of the evening. We had our own room with its own paraffin burning stove. The family was Druse and they looked after us extremely well, giving us a great lentil and bean stew thing which we gulped down. There were four sons and no daughters in the family but they spoke quite a lot of English and got out the water pipe and bought in some very nice Swayda white wine for all of us. Up to that point I had thought that Syrian wine was pretty awful but this was really very nice. We enjoyed it listening to the worsening storm outside very glad that we were not in the tent!

That night my chest began to hurt and I began to cough, however since we had not got as far as we had wanted that day we thought we would push on slowly to Bosra and then see the ruins there at least. I did not make very good progress, the cough worsened and my energy levels fell badly. However after about one hour the wind died down and the weather got warmer and we made it to Bosra for a picnic lunch in the huge Roman theatre there. The theatre is enormous and built, like the rest of Bosra, from the same black basalt rocks we had been cycling past for the last 2 days. Bosra was built by the Nabateans and was a key trading point on old caravan routes, before being the capital of the Roman empire in these parts under Emperor Philip, an arab born in Swayda. The Roman thetre is extremely well preserved and an impressive sight, on the outside it is surrounded by huge citadel walls, added later by the arabs.
I was really in need of a rest having got the start of a chest infection, so we asked at the restaurants around the theatre if we could stay, but their prices were extortionate, so we thought to cycle on slowly and camp somewhere.

We got about one hour from Bosra and the camping options were few, we realised we were going to need to ask to stay in one of the olive groves. At this point we passed a house with a group of men outside enjoying the sun's setting rays while drinking their tea. Immediately they yelled “tea tea” at us and urged us to stop. We stopped, thinking we could get water from them when the father- Farouk - came over and invited us to stay in his house with his large family. Again happily we accepted as I was feeling very tired at this point and thought that another warm night would be exactly what I needed to get over the cold I had caught. We were shown in to a very beautifully carpeted room and given the best spot nearest the stove. We met Farouk's many brothers; most of the men in the extended family worked in either Kuwait or The Emirates and spoke a reasonable amount of English. The family however was huge; we met granddad who had had 11 children, who each had had about 9-11 children, the family numbered around 70! And they all seemed to want to meet us!

We were treated to a lovely hot shower and a traditional supper of eggs, salad, olives, cheese and meat all scooped up with Arabic flatbread. We all settled down to watch Gladiator on VCD and after got an early night in a lovely warm room. However that night I did not sleep well, my cold had worsened and I spent the night sweating and coughing. In the morning I awoke with a fever and headache. Farouk's family instantly said we must stay and sleep and then even took me to the doctor where Farouk paid for the visit and all the antibiotics and cough mixture prescribed. I do not really remember much from that day except waking up every now and again to see Grandma by me tucking me in or mopping my brow.

We ended up staying with the family for 3 nights in total. We were very lucky to meet them they looked after us so well and I am amazed at how hospitable Syrian people are.

We set off to try to cycle to Jerash in Jordan and the first 20 miles were flat and OK but the first slope we encountered in Dara'a made me realise I was not totally better. I had only been ill one week before in Palmyra and I was feeling pretty low. Anyway we stopped at a shop and bought a lot of fruit juice and cleared the border procedure quite easily. We stopped at the Tourist Police inside Jordan to ask for a map and any info. They invited us in for tea and then asked us if we smoked. When we said no their eyes lit up and they asked us to go back to the duty free and buy a load of cigarettes for them. We obliged, quite amused as we had heard from other travellers that most people were made to carry cigarettes in for someone, usually the taxi or bus driver they are using, but we had thought we had escaped this task by being on bicycle, obviously not!

Eventually we set off cycling into Jordan and within about the first 500m had our first stone thrown at us! Jordan is imfamous amongst cyclists for this type of welcome but we were a little surprised that it had happened quite so early on into our trip there. My progress was getting worse and worse and the road was hilly with a head wind. However there were trees and hills which were a surprise after the mostly flat landscape of southern and eastern Syria. Eventually we realised we were not going to make it to Jerash so we found a camping spot in the woods and enjoyed cooking outside again. The next day we planned to get to Madaba and bypass Amman. But by now Robin had caught my cold and the winds were pretty bad and the road always seemed to be uphill. Our progress was pitifully slow and young boys at the roadside were throwing stones and trying to grab onto the bikes as we cycled past. We were really not in the mood for this and so we headed into Amman and found the Cliff Hotel, which was cheap and had a nice living room with a warm stove and constant cups of tea made us feel a bit better.

Amman is huge but not as noisy or bustling as the cities in Syria. It is apparently built across 7 hills, but seems to have grown to cover many more since then. The city was the capital of the Ammonite kingdom and another important caravan city before gradually falling into obscurity: it was a small unimportant town before the British created the state of Jordan and made it the capital. Modern Amman is not a very exciting city, we saw the Roman Theatre but it didn't look so impressive after Bosra. The citadel has good hilltop views but is mostly ruined too. We failed to find the entrance after walking almost the entire way around the outer walls, got fed up and climbed up over a low point in the walls. Only to drop down the other side right beside the tourist police, fortunately the guy thought it was hilarious so let us off, especially when we asked him about the flag. Probably the most enjoyable thing about our sight seeing was the enormous Jordanian Flag that flies over the city. (It was 60 metres by 30 metres!).

We stayed three nights in Amman recovering from our colds, looking around and sheltering from some really very heavy rain. We spent a lot of time reading and playing backgammon, but were soon bored. I was still not feeling well enough to cycle south so we devised a plan to go somewhere more interesting, without the bikes.

---

Photos

Jordan River Valley
Into the Hills in North Jordan

This is Jordan!
Poster in Amman, not really sure what this one about....

Syrian Hospitality
Farouk's family, who looked after me when I was ill.

Comments

[peter sorrosa]

nice photo
very nice photo exivet