Arabian Nights

Aleppo, 6 May 2002

Getting out of Jordan and into Syria took longer than we expected, but it wasn't at all bad - or not all of it. The story started in Jordan, before we'd even reached the Syrian border.
We reached the South African embassy 2 minutes (yes, only two) minutes before it closed at noon on a Thursday afternoon. Being a Muslim country, Jordan's weekend starts on Thursday evening - Friday being the Holy day for Muslims and runs through until Saturday with everyone back at work on Sunday.
I know, it's a weird set up but that's the way it works in the Arab world - you should try reading the street names in Arabic. Anyway, we arrived just in time to be told the SA embassy was closing early and would only reopen on Monday as they were celebrating Seffrica's national day.
We made some use of the spare time by making friends with the people at the British embassy and getting Lisa's settlement visa. It was issued in one day with a minimum of fuss and bother - not the case when trying to do the same sort of thing in Seffrica.
We'd been bush camping (budget accommodation in Jordan costs about the same as upmarket luxury in Africa) just below the hilltop (now a monastery) where Moses is reputed to have first seen the Promised Land shortly before dying - and if he saw sunsets similar to the ones we saw, we can understand why he considered it the Promised Land.
Perched a thousand metres above the Dead Sea and the Jordan Valley, all those Sunday School sessions came back to us and we realised how small everything really is. So many of the names we'd had drummed into us were visible, especially as darkness encroached and sulphurous city lights pricked the darkness. Biblical Jerusalem, Jericho, Bethlehem were arrayed before us alongside a series of more recently infamous towns.

Syria to Keep You Waiting
After getting all the documentation together and presenting ourselves at the Syrian embassy in Amman - notorious for being exceedingly fickle about issuing visas - we had our passports examined for any sign of loose yarmulka threads or other signs that we'd visited "Occupied Palestine", as Israel is called.
We'd been expecting long delays and lots of uphill but the Syrian bureaucrats were amongst the most efficient and polite - if not outrightly friendly - we'd met. And they have a good line in applicants.
We'd been standing in line behind a couple when we handed our applications in. The Syrians wanted colour pictures but relented when we turned our well-practiced "soppy tourist" expressions on them.
We got chatting to Sylvain and Tania when we returned in the afternoon to collect our visas. After half an hour of moving out of the middle of the road every 5 minutes to avoid being run over by Jordanian drivers - who seem to consider brakes, indicators and steering wheel as unnecessary extras and the horn and the prime vehicle accessory - we were invited for coffee which turned into dinner, a tour of the amphitheatre and a bed for the night.
The next morning we headed north to the Syrian border with Tania and Sylvain squashed into the back of the truck. Just as well they came along because nobody on the Syrian side of the border spoke more than a few words of English while we still hadn't progressed beyond saying "thank you" and "no" in Arabic.
After the Jordanian border officials had once again tried to rip us off because the officials at our point of entry had only made our vehicle permit valid for 3 days and we now had to pay a fine. After throwing my toys - I seem to have become much better at timing my tantrums with officials! - and a demand to see the boss, things were sorted on a "no charge" basis.

Then and Now
Taking a vehicle into Syria is a bit of a nightmare, especially if it's a diesel vehicle. They charge $100 a week to get a diesel truck into Syria, but this is somewhat ameliorated by the cost of diesel: about 12 US Cents a litre.
It cost us another $40 for insurance and inspection costs and about 2 hours to find out why we needed to change foreign currency into Syrian Pounds at the border and then pay the border costs with this. The Syrian Pounds we'd changed in Amman weren't acceptable: we had to change foreign currency at the border!
Once again, we were led to the boss' office to resolve the issue and ensure we weren't being ripped off. Sylvain served as the long-suffering interpreter, speaking Arabic as he does after 7 years teaching French in Amman.
The plus side of all this is that we were served numerous cups of tea by the boss and spent about an hour chatting with him in stilted English and Arabic with a large handful of mime thrown in. We weren't being ripped off - it's just government regulations.

Souq and Ye Shall Find
Not terribly long afterwards, we were in Damascus, blundering through busy traffic in a bid to find the cheap hotel section of town. We ended up parking about half a kilometre away from the hotel because the streets leading to it were only just navigable in the truck - but not when other cars were parked half on pavement, half in road. The narrowness of the streets is testified to by the number of scrapes on the sides of the vehicles which inhabit them.
In the short time we spent in Damascus, we visited the old, walled section which contains most of the tourist attractions hidden down crooked side streets with overhanging upper floors which crowd out the light and put one in mind of mediaeval British cities.
It is also the site of the Umayyad Mosque built in 705 and intended to be the "greatest ever". At the time it was built, Damascus was the capital of the Muslim world and the mosque was an adaptation of a Christian cathedral which was, in turn, built on top of a Roman temple.
Near the mosque is the Mausoleum of Salah ad-Din (the Saladin of western primary school history lessons). The Old City of Damascus also hosts the Souq al-Hamidiyya. Souq's are Syria's version of shopping malls and predate the modern monstrosities by quite a while.
They are also more atmospheric, interesting and alive - if you can handle the attention from a thousand merchants all wanting to sell you things at "best prices".

Knight and Day
After two days in Damascus we took our leave of Sylvain and Tania and pointed the truck towards Krak des Chevaliers, a remarkably well-preserved Crusader Castle perched atop a hill with a view over two different valleys.
The castle is built on a spit of a hill in what must be the best placement I've ever seen for a fortress. The Emir of Homs first constructed a fortress on the site in 1031 but by the middle of the 12th century the Crusaders had taken charge, building and expanding the walls and halls to the state in which it now exists.
Krak was obviously a tough nut because its walls were never breached by attackers. It was eventually given up by the Crusader occupiers, down to about 200 from the 2000-strong garrison the castle was designed for, in 1271. The beleaguered occupants were by this time a last outpost of the Crusaders in the Middle East and agreed to leave Krak des Chevaliers in return for safe conduct when it was besieged by the Muslim warlord Beybars.
The "brave" Crusaders had sufficient supplies to last for 5 years but marched out and abandoned the fortress after only a month.
The campsite behind the hotel was nice enough - well, the view over the valley - that we stayed for two nights, shivering our way to bed in the evenings and gaping at the snow on the mountains to the south of us, in Lebanon.
South was also the direction we took when we left, back towards the highway. Just before reaching it we stopped for the typical travellers' picture of Lisa beneath a sign proclaiming: London Cape Town Adventure Route. It was rather weird seeing signposts to Cape Town in the, um, middle of the Middle East but we soon discovered what the adventure part referred to - the truck started spewing diesel from the feed line to the alternator as well as diesel from somewhere in the diesel pump.

Adventure Rout
The oil leak wasn't too hard to fix but the diesel spillage was another matter and we had to live with it all the way to Aleppo. The souq in Aleppo is even better than the one in Damascus. In between all the tourist shops and imported clothing and gunk are the stalls frequented by the locals, selling everything from spices (exquisitely displayed to tempt shoppers), sheep's heads (brains and eyeballs are a delicacy costing twice what a steak does), material (with on-site tailors if you need them) and buttons, ribbons, baubles and shiny bits to roasted nuts (with the drying ovens in the rear of the shop), car parts and tools, and farming implements.
Our evening meals were courtesy of a small falafel stand a couple of streets away from the hotel we were staying at. Despite the lack of English or Arabic, depending on which side of the counter you are looking from, we managed to order "sandweech" (the local spelling in most of the Middle East) with salad, crushed falafel and tahina sauce - scrumptious.
From here, it's a brief trip to the Turkish border - we've been advised to cross via Kilis to the north of Aleppo rather than going east to Antakya as Kilis is quieter and simpler.