Day Five (ctd) Damascus to Palmyra

Picture 1 and 2 : Signs for Iraq and Bagdad

Picture 3: The Road heading East to Iraq

Picture 4: Bus entertainment, crucifixion

Picture 5: Stark Cafe

Picture 6: Stairway Onions


The bus was packed. We hesitantly handed over our passports outside of the bus to our ticket tout and walked up the aisle looking for seats. We were pointed to the back seat and settled back for the four hour trip through the desert.
A high proportion of the passengers seem to be from the Syrian Army. We were surrounded by policemen and soldiers. The fellow next to Wayne was extremely friendly and became so familiar that he would rest his arm and hand on Wayne's thigh for long periods of time.
About a dozen people around us were fascinated with Wayne's camera and phone, which made for easy communication without much use of language.
They made a point of letting us know when something of interest was coming up. This was hardly necessary as anything of interest I had noted twenty minutes beforehand myself as it was glaringly obvious on the barren desert horizon.
Very friendly people and once again, genuinely interested to know about who we were and where we were from.
A video was playing and it seemed a little out place to be watching Muslim people enthralled in a scene depicting a recreation of Christ's crucifixion (it was actually a Jean Claude Van Demme movie).
On the way we passed a turnoff for Bagdad/Iraq. It was 150 kilometres away. Felt a little weird.
There were actually a couple of roadside food places called "Bagdad Cafe".
Toward the end of the trip I started feeling really cold again.
When we arrived in Palmyra we had to walk down the main street and the reception was incredible. Young children everywhere were saying "hello" and "welcome". It was incredible how many times we were greeted. From balconies, doorways, playing in the street, there must have been forty children that made a point of greeting us. It was pretty touching.

Our hotel room was up six flights of stairs and at each yurn of flight, in the corner was a pile of onions. The only reason we come up with for this was it looked recently painted and perhaps the onions neutralised the smell. Who knows? I guess we could have asked, though that would only quell our curiousity.
I had been wanting to go to the toilet for a while on the bus and quickly discovered that I was ill.
We went down to eat in the hotel cafe and I went up and down those six flights of stairs at least 4 times to revisit the toilet, which was not functioning correctly and involved using a hose everytime it was used. Remember that each turn of the stairs has a pile of onions in them. Their sight and smell only helped to increase my sense of sickness.
I was exhausted again. Back in the cafe, Wayne and I made plans for our next day. The conclusion of this was that we would have to rise at 5.30 am to see ruins at 6, this would allow us to press on for a tour of other parts of Syria that we awanted to see.
I told our host that I was ill and wanted to go to bed; could he rush a meal?. He said he was a nurse at the local hospital and knew exactly what to prepare for me.
It took an hour and a half of freezing in this stark cafe before my comfort food arrived..boiled potatoes. Just boiled potatoes.
I ate them, rushed once again to the toilet and went to bed (for a very interrupted sleep due to explosive diarrhoea) for the early rise.

Day Five Damascus

Photo 1 : Ummayad Mosque, Damascus Minaret

Photo 2: Ummayad Mosque, Damascus Courtyard gold mosaics

Photo 3: Damascus Pistachio pastries

Photo 4: On display inside the Azem Palace museum, a 19th Century softdrink bottle, perhaps?

Photo 5: Damascus Roman Western Temple Gate

Photos 2, 3 and 6 from Wayne

Lebanon to Damascus in a taxi. To catch a taxi, one has to wait until the cab is filled before it leaves. So at th taxi area, drivers will shout out there destination. Each seat in the car is worth “x” amount of money and you can buy out the seats and go immediately, though generally the wait for other passengers is not too long. I waited 45 minutes. You can walk around the area as the driver keeps an eye on his customers. I can’t exactly remember how much I paid though it’s a ridiculously small price to pay for what you get.

Getting from Lebanon to Syria meant a slightly organised rigmarole of getting in and out of the taxi on four separate occasions. There’s been tension between Syria and Lebanon in the recent past, though at the moment it has eased off a little. The actual people speak kindly of each other, which is different of my experience in the UK where many Scottish border people have little kind words for the English.
My companions on the trip were four Syrian men and a Palestinian lady. All of them really worked hard to let me feel welcome. These are the little moments that are the real deal and it makes me feel good just remembering the kindness.
I was alike a hot chip to the seagulls when I was dropped near the bus station and set upon by hotel touts.. mind you, this was the only experience of being really hassled for money in Syria. The taxi driver really gave it to the hotel peddlers on my behalf. They backed off.

I walked to the hotel, Al Haramein, a great find off the internet in a little pedestrian alley.
A nice old building with courtyard area.
I had a scour around the town for a few hours. The souks (markets, shops in a covered bazaar setting) are a great place to get look at a cross section of the locals and easily feel a little more part of the scene. I had a kebab and fruit juice (hand squeezed, around 40 cents).

Damasus is the oldest continually inhabited city in the world.
The city radiates from the Ummayad Mosque, built on what was originally an Aramean
Temple 3000 BC. It claims to contain the head of John the Baptist, though so do a few other places in the world).
When I got back to hotel, I started getting the shivers and could not get warm enough. It was coldish though not ridiculous. I put on a kerosene heater, as well as four layers including a fleece and feel asleep, exhausted under a couple of blankets.
My friend Wayne was to arrive from London that night around midnight.
I awoke when he arrived.

The next day we went out to discover more of Damascus, which essentially was looking at the mosque as well as walking the atmospheric streets of the old city and we had a look at the Azem Palace which is old Damascus House built during the 18th century. It has displays of Damascene arts and craftsmanship.
We were keen to move onto Palmyra which was four and a half hours away, so we were at the bus station which was one of the most chaotic places I’ve ever seen. Not a huge place, though a security check line ups, touts all over with a cut throat business mentality; it was absolute madness. Despite all of this, or perhaps because of it, we were on a bus within 3 minutes. This sparked a verbal fight between two touts. We were on our way…hopefully to Palmyra..we were sort of sure.

Day Four Lebanon Beirut and Baalbek

Pictures:
I'm having trouble posting photos for some reason at the moment.
In the meantime here's a few:
Photo 1: St Georges Bay Sailing Club Beirut, Lebanon which suffered a terrorist bomb blast in February 2005 which took the life of a former Lebanese Prime Minister and seventeen others
Photo 2: The Temple of Bacchus, Baalbek, Lebanon
Photo 3: Signs for Hezbollah in Bekaa Valley, Lebanon

It was about 8 pm and absolutely poured with rain when I arrived in Beirut. Through that night a mighty and very loud thunderstorm went on for what seemed like hours.
I went for a cab ride around town to orientate myself and have a look at the city at night.
Beirut is on the Mediterranan coast and there are some lovely view points around the city, particularly an area called "The Pigeon Rocks". This area, to me, felt very much like Eastern Sydney coastal areas.
The "Downtown" area was obliterated in the 70s. There's been civil war between Muslims and Christians, there's been war with the Israelis and more recently problems with Syria leading to terrorist attacks. Part of the shopping area has been rebuilt and feels a little weird. It's flawless, built in sympathy with surrounding buildings in this honey coloured stone (one book describes it as Disney like, which I felt was a fair description), though it was like a ghost town when I was there.
The cab driver was going to drop me at a restaurant with a view for late dinner and I asked him to take me to a cafe that he would eat at.


It looked promising as the cafe was up a back street, clean as a really clean whistle and the few men in there were watching tv with their food etc.
The food was brilliant. I'm not sure what the best part was; Great tasting grilled meat, awesome meze dips, fresh salads, soft warm bread though I fear that perhaps the real reason I felt like a king when I was eating was that I was served the first beer that I'd had on the trip.

No, wait, I tell a lie. Two men in a shop in Petra happily sold me what they thought was the best beer in the world. I was ecstatic to find beer being sold in a corner style store. When I got to my room and opened them, I found out pretty quickly that it was (Laziza) non alcoholic beer. I had bought three bottles and tipped two and three quarters down the sink.
So not only was I served a beer, it was actually an ice cold, alcoholic beer in a chilled glass; it went down a treat.

Beirut is known for it's excellent nightclubs with great live music.
I felt pretty exhausted, having started the day in the desert way back when and I would have probably gone out if I was with someone half keen to go, but instead watched half of a early 70s Egyptian movie featuring many beautiful, leggy women. Strangely, the plot would always work so there was a focus on their bare legs). I'm not complaining, though it was weird.
Thinking about it now, I guess Benny Hill reruns would seem a trifle odd to a newly arrived foreign initiate.

Next day, just another quick look around the town in daylight.
There's a lot of very expensive new developments built all over the city, though they will be next door to most run down looking places.
Buildings are scarred from bullets and war blasts. I wouldn't pretend to know what sort of horrible things the People of Beirut had gone through in very recent past. I cannot imagine the mind set of someone who has lived through seing death, bombs, shootings in their own town and then staying there and getting on with it. The few people I met were very nice to me and it didn't seem very polite to discuss their opinions on things at length. The taxi driver, with whom I spent about an hour and a half just wanted to focus on the rebuilding of the city.
I got a bus stop and began a three part journey to Baalbek, in the Bekaa Valley, near the Syrian Border.
The bus ride is a story in itself which I won't go into now, though at one stage, I felt I was being transported by the Beverly Hillbillies of the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon.

My main reason to go was to see the ruins of Baalbek on the way to Damascus.
A UNESCO site, apparently Baalbek is one of the finest examples of architecture at Imperial Rome's most powerful point.

Baalbeck’s awe-inspiring temples and city ruins are among the largest and finest examples of Roman architecture in the world. Visitors can easily spend several hours, or an entire day, exploring the wonders of this ancient city – from the grandeur of the columned temples to the intricately carved stonework, and the sheer size of the stones used to construct the temples. Like many archaeologists and historians, you will be amazed at the ancient feats of engineering required to build these magnificent stone monuments.
From sacredsites.com


As I walked into the site I was accosted by a few people selling coins and the usual guidebooks. One guy, however was imploring I buy one of his t shirts, which featured a shadow of a raised arm holding a huge gun.
Vague, as I am, I said no an walked on into the site. I hired a guide to show me around for an hour. (hiring a guide sounds expensive, though it's excellent value and as you can imagine you get a lot more out of a visit anywhere).
My guide had been working there since 1962. 1962!! He knew it all. He was a nice bloke and he made it all very interesting. The main things that stick in my mind are the mind blowing size of the structures and the stones they moved to put it in place.


In 27 BC, the Roman emperor Augustus supposedly took the unfathomable decision to build in the middle of nowhere the grandest and mightiest temple of antiquity, the Temple of Jupiter, whose platform, and big courtyard are retained by three walls containing twenty-seven limestone blocks, unequaled in size anywhere in the world, as they all weigh in excess of 300 metric tons. Three of the blocks, however, weigh more than 800 tons each. This block trio is world-renowned as the "Trilithon".

People that should know don't know how these foundation blocks were transported. It's a mystery to rival the pyramids, apparently.
Snowcapped mountains as a backdrop against the ruins made a beautiful setting.

"Why these stones are such an enigma to contemporary scientists, both engineers and archaeologists alike, is that their method of quarrying, transportation and precision placement is beyond the technological ability of any known ancient or modern builders. "
From:
http://www.sacredsites.com/middle_east/lebanon/baalbek.htm. It has good pictures if you want more info on Baalbek.


My Guide book mentioned a kidnapping and shooting within Baalbek in the seventies by the Hezbollah party. I mentioned this to my guide an he said he knew nothing of it, followed by silence. I didn't persue the point. Though the penny was starting to drop for me about the t shirt and posters I had seen in the town:

From Frontline:
"Posters of Hezbollah "martyrs," or suicide bombers, line the streets of the city. A souvenir store sells videos of Hezbollah guerrillas attacking Israeli soldiers, alongside shelves of Hezbollah hats and postcards. They even market a Hezbollah scent called "perfume of the martyrs." "

I asked the guide (I've forgotten his name, unfortunately) where is a cheap place for good Lebanese food and he took me fifty metres to his mate's cafe. I was warmly welcomed into a small, bare cafe that made the King of Yeeros' Wickham Castle look like a Mc Donalds.
They wanted to chat and fed me good microwavable local pastries. I noticed a few bottles of wine. I was aware that Lebanese wine is very famous and recently had read the best wines of Lebanon come from the Bekaa Valley. They served me excellent wine and coffee which doubled my heart rate.
It felt real good being there.

I caught a bus to a town called Chtaura and then a taxi in the form of a huge American gas guzzling Dodge, to cross the border and go to Damascus, Syria.