Cradle of Civilisation

Day 18
I had hoped that I’d be able to get round the sights of Aleppo today, but my bus left Antakya rather later than I had been promised and that, combined with some pretty early closing times, made it impossible. It was probably the emptiest bus I’ve been on; while there have been plenty of local ladies on other buses, there were none on this one. At the border I noticed how many car transporters were coming into Turkey-I’m not sure if Syria is a manufacturer, dealer or simply place of transit.

It took me quite a while to pass through Syrian immigration. As required, I had got my visa in advance, but my passport needed a lot of scrutiny. The border guy went through it very carefully once and then repeated his examination: I think he’d have done this anyway, but the number of Turks who kept pushing their passports at him may have made him lose track. A rather strange approach to queuing had been adopted: rather than one person standing behind the other, 3 or 4 passport piles formed in front of the border guard and everyone scrummed round. Every so often someone would move their passport from one pile to another, or pick theirs up and wave it at the guard shouting; he’d look at them, say nothing and go back to my passport. I couldn’t help but feel they were just making it all go slower: I resisted the colonial approach of trying to teach the natives good British queuing. Anyway, the guard eventually stamped my passport and I edged through the scrum to retrieve it, but rather than hand it to me, it went to Mustafa, who examined it once more. I do have a lot of stamps for them to examine (after the beggar stamped a clean page, I’m down to 4) and they clearly wanted to be absolutely certain than none of them were Israeli. When you apply for a visa you have to confirm that you have not visited the ‘occupied territory of Palestine’. I have quite a lot of sympathy for their position. However, given geography and the nature of travellers, this mean I met no one in Turkey coming from Syria, but plenty of people going the other way: people simply visit Syria, then go to Israel afterwards. You can also try and charm the Israeli’s into not stamping your passport.

One of the things that you cannot possibly avoid from the moment you enter the country are the pictures of a man in his late 30s or 40s with a tasche in a suit. He is either the president or the most shameless self-publicist you’ll find whose surname isn’t Beckham. Even by African standards, he’s got his mug in a lot places.

We’d barely got over the border when we filled up with fuel. This is hardly surprising as Turkey’s fuel is more expensive than ours, while a litre of Syrian petrol is about 25p. Syria is a country that is very popular with a certain kind of traveller. My room (single, shared bathroom) in the centre of the country’s second biggest city is described by LP as ‘not the cheapest backpacker place in town but the best’; it costs £3 a night. Having been gagging for a falafel since Istanbul, I’ve finally just had one. It was superb and cost 15p (this is a full sandwich with salad and everything). It doesn’t look possible to spend £1.50 on a bus anywhere. In some ways, it’s rather shaming.

My first stop was the cash machine. One Syrian pound (they’re mostly called lira, but they use the £ symbol) is 1p sterling. This is the kind of exchange rate that is simple to calculate when you’re spending-£50 or £120 goes easily to pounds, but always makes me a little nervous at the cash machine. Have I put another nought on the end of what I need? Have I just withdrawn enough cash to buy an apartment?

Flush with cash I headed to the photo free National Museum, which was rather better than I had expected. The settlement at Aleppo dates back to the 9th Millennium BC, so there’s a bit of history about. Many of the artefacts themselves weren’t exactly earth shattering, but the stories they tell were something else. There were a significant number of cuneiform tablets from the 2nd and 3rd Millennia BC. These mostly concerned administrative and bureaucratic issues. Not a riveting read, but it says a lot about the kind of people, the kind of civilisation that existed in this area. Add to that archaeological finds from 8200 BC alongside 4m high walls from 7000 BC and Syria’s Cradle of Civilisation moniker seems well earned. I shall try and take this line when I next meet my friends in US immigration.

The museum did have a rather disorganised feel. In fact parts of it looked as if it had been robbed, with some display cases largely empty and clean shadows visible where exhibits must have set earlier. The labels in display cases were all in Arabic and usually had a second language: this was often English, but often reflected which European country had been involved in the excavations. Syria was a French colony and the French influence was evident both in the museum and in the significant number of squat and drop toilets in Syria.

I had a walk round the Christian quarter and managed to nip into the Armenian Church of 40 martyrs, where I was given a personal tour by the trainee priest. It was rather bizarre and I’ve forgotten most of what he said as I was in a bit of shock. I got the usual marriage and age questions, but was thrown when he asked me if I was Catholic or Orthodox (as if these were the only two options). When I started stammering, he started hammering through most of the world’s religions, though he did omit Jedi. Then he asked me if I had a camera. By this stage I was wondering if he actually was a priest; he manoeuvred me round the Church saying ‘very nice’ each time he took a photo and then ‘over there’ to move me to the next bit. I didn’t get to catch my breath and when we moved outside, I was starting to wonder if I was going to have to chase a fake priest down the street in order to get my camera back.

I now have 10 pictures of me and the Armenian Church. As this strange sequence progresses, I look more and more uncomfortable.



I feel a bit bad that I deliberately forgot the name of my hotel when he asked when I was staying; I’m fairly happy now that he was just sweet and enthusiastic rather than psychotic. Still, I shall think twice before entering another Armenian Church.

So far I’ve seen quite a lot of the English alphabet, which is a relief. I can recognise a few basic numbers in Arabic script, but I have to say the text is a bit of a struggle. Comparing English and Arabic notations in the museum made me hope I won’t have to read much of the Arabic alphabet very often. Street names so far have been in both scripts.

It seems that the lack of tourists at this time of year may prove a bit of a pain-there are a few spots around Aleppo that it is only really practical to visit by organised tour. However, numbers aren’t looking good for any tours to be running. Hopefully a visit to the tourist office tomorrow will resolve this. Otherwise, I could do some of it from Hama when I get there next week.

I was planning on an early night; truth is I have yet to learn that such an expectation invariably produces the opposite result. I pottered down through the floors heading towards an early dinner; reaching reception I saw that the Aussie girls who’ve been stalking me since Gallipoli were sat there. So the evening took a slightly different turn. Cards were followed by a night out with Ahmad, the Kuwaiti owner of our gaff. After a quick fuel stop, we headed to the bar of the Baron Hotel, where Agatha Christie had a connection and about which T E Lawrence writes in 7 Pillars (they have a display case with a magnifying glass on the relevant section). I guess there’ll be more of that. In the bar we learnt that Ahmad had to pay a special tax on his gay employee (I’m not wholly sure about this, it may have been a line). Then we headed onto a club, which to my memory looked identical to the one I went to in Zanzibar. I think it must be an off the shelf layout from the ‘Clubs R Us’ website. I felt most young, at least compared to the other men. We were generally confused as to the exact status of the girls-almost all were a fair bit younger than their companions. There was general surprise at what several people were wearing-the Aussie girls were a lot more covered up than many of the locals. With the amount of drinking that was also going on, it was clear that this was not Iran. Musically it was perhaps 10% western with stalwarts that I have heard across the world in the last year; of the local stuff, a lot of beats and rhythms were pretty familiar before that classic Middle Eastern high pitched violin instrument would kick in, give the local feel and the Arabic vocals would begin. While it failed to get Jade and I on the dance floor, it was definitely working for most of the rest of the place. It was a fun night, tho not the sort of club I’m about to start frequenting. I’m still smiling at being told ‘you don’t look like a cool guy, but you are a cool guy.’ Mainly because I’m not sure what it really means. When the cab dropped us off, Ahmad told us that a few weeks ago there had been public executions by the clock tower, a minute’s walk away from the hotel. So far Syria seems to be mix of quite a lot of different things.

Day 19
I spent the first part of the morning picking up my e mail and going to the tourist information centre to try and arrange a tour to Qala’at Samaan, the Dead Cities and Apamea. Well I spent the actual first part of the morning in bed, but straight afterwards I got on to sorting things out. I didn’t have much success-these things are easy enough when it isn’t winter, but after a word with Ahmad, it seems he’ll be doing something tomorrow and I won’t be the only one, so it won’t be scary expensive. I also found out about train times to Lattakia, my next stop, and pottered up to the train station to buy a ticket. I found the tracks without too much bother, but getting to the station proved more challenging and I think I must have looked pretty daft trying to orientate the LP map to the one I got in the tourist info office. I got a sinking feeling as I queued to get a ticket when I suddenly remembered you need a passport to buy a bus ticket. Then I saw the ID check window. Bugger. In the end it didn’t much matter as you can only buy a ticket one day in advance. 6.00 a.m. train at that. Might give the clubbing a rest tonight.

After a quick pit stop for a falafel (making up for lost time there), I headed to the old city and the citadel, which is a beast. There wasn’t any real info there, but whoever it was made the residents of Aleppo build this, they must have some scary bad guys.



Thinking about it, I suppose it may have been a crusade as it was from the 12th century. The mound was man made and most of the place inside the walls was in ruins. Both in and around there was a great deal of construction/reconstruction going on-I’ve not been able to learn much about the Syrian charter of historic buildings, or whatever the policy will be called. Sadly the place had a very large amount of rubbish scattered around it; the following day I met Ash from Canberra, who’d been in Amman for some weeks and said she was starting to get used to the way pretty much anything would be dropped to the ground once it was finished with. I felt it was like India, where the meeting of modern packaging materials and ancient cultures produced something environmentally unfortunate.

I climbed up the bridge



to enter the citadel, and although the main entrance clearly bore round to the left, I was distracted by a small door in the right corner with a little staircase leading up from it. I plumped for that and, much as I expected, was soon above the citadel entrance amongst slits for firing arrows and holes through which boiling oil could be poured and rocks thrown. Attacking this place would have been no picnic. The area was surprisingly large, but what was more surprising as I tottered through another door was the magnificent throne room.



I spent a long time in the citadel, in many ways there wasn’t so much to see, but it was mazey to walk through and had many great spots to sit and look over the city. I in the sun for a while in the amphitheatre in the citadel’s centre and as folk walked by, I thought that Steve and Anita would be in Iran by now and hoped that Anita was managing to keep her head scarf secured.

Later I was sat on the roof of some building when the first call to afternoon prayer rang out. I was staring out over countless minarets (Aleppo has about 1,000 mosques, which according to the tourist board means it is considered the 3rd city in the Islamic world). The next few minutes were unexpected and quite wonderful; the number of mosques calling the faithful to prayer grew and grew; high above the city, I had been sat in quiet and the now Aleppo was waking. I had a real sense of the sound rising up to me, giving it an almost physical quality. The clarity of this moment gave me a very different take on what one hears down in the hubbub of the street, where the mosque tannoys just seem to much noise. It was a slight shame that I turned out to be sat on a mosque, as when that call started it drowned out what was happening around. I couldn’t help but smile that even now there was no escaping the modern world, as my mosque’s call was clearly punctuated by the interference from the caller’s mobile phone being too close to the microphone.

On the way out I got some sense of how massive the construction must have been: the main entrance was through a massive barrel vault that turned through 90 degrees on several occasion. The ceiling must have been 30 feet high.

Afterwards I had a mad half hour when I visited the Souq and the Great Mosque. The Souq is a huge covered maze of shops and bazaars. Running over 10 km, it is one of the sights of the town so I went in for a wander. This was somewhat naïve, as I was fairly set upon by touts and shopkeepers making a bit of a browse rather tricky. Without being totally rude you can’t stop and talk with everyone who starts up chat-in a souq you know there’s an end game, but some take ages to get to it. I had walked on quite a way from one guy when he shouted after me ‘you’re not English, you’re Scottish’. I guess this was a dread insult proffered to the rude limey who’d refused his offer of kebab. I stumbled around and the touts essentially drove me out of the clothing areas and their tourist appeal. So I found myself passing a butcher’s with an unidentified headless corpse, through the baby section and into the specialist section where you could get a nice leather holster for your handgun. I became the tourist cliché and got properly lost and disorientated.

Finally escaping into the open air, I found the great mosque. I hadn’t been in there long when I felt like I was being followed. Then there was laughter too. After a couple of glances over my shoulder I turned round fully to find a family of mum, 4 daughters and 2 sons. Emboldened by eye contact, mum waved her camera phone. So I lined up with 2 boys and the little girl. I noticed the 3 girls in headscarves stayed with Mum. The little girl ran after me as I carried on round and came to speak to me 3 times. On the first 2 occasions, I shrugged, went English and looked lost. On the third occasion I applied my nightclub rule-if you’ve said ‘pardon’ twice and still can’t make out what’s being said the third time, pick Yes or No and hope for the best. So Yes it was. Wreathed in smiles she ran back to Mum and it became obvious I had agreed to a more extended photo session; this time the other 3 girls also got involved. Various different lineups arranged themselves around me, with the littlest trying to get in all of them, which was not allowed. During the last one she was on her back being whirled in circles by the younger brother. All of this meant that I didn’t notice the Great Mosque so much.



Just walking the streets here can be quite an experience. A sense of frenzied commerce is created as goods are continually being loaded and unloaded, a process that is not hidden in warehouses off major motorways as in England. Crossing roads is crazy, traffic thunders and weaves and I have learnt to shadow a local. Often the only way is to make some progress, stop while cars pass/screech by on either side of you and then move again. I suppose it’s like real life Frogger.

Dinner was unexpected tonight. I was heading downstairs past the Arab floor (they all stay on the 1st floor) where a feast was in progress for which I was promptly collared. Repeatedly I was told Eat, Eat as bread was thrown as me and a variety of local good stuff pushed at me for me to try. It was very good and lots of fun. The hospitality is legendary and I sat with the 4 guys at my table and had a great laugh. I did make a bit of gaff when I said some cheese was like Feat-Mohamed and Kalir are Turkish

I found out everyone was significantly younger than they looked-the smoking can’t help. You almost feel rude turning down the proffered fags; there’s no possibility of anyone going ‘do you mind if I smoke’ anywhere (it was the same in Turkey, where I often saw cooks with one on the go). Ahmad smokes 100 a day; that’s such a level of commitment that I almost admire him for it. Ash told me in Jordan it has only been illegal to smoke in an Operating Theatre for the last year. Only Sahib spoke English, but we all managed a fair degree of understanding with arm waving and Sahib translating when we got stuck, even if much of the conversation was on football. Me knowing the Aussie girls produced much sniggering and nudging amongst everyone. None of this got translated, but I found the Arab for Australian is basically the same, only followed by a dirty laugh. When I actually sat and spoke to Jade later, they were almost beside themselves. Any time I caught them in my eyeline there were broad smiles and winks. That aside, they were lots of fun and very very friendly and welcoming.

I said to Ash the next day that the men were like 14 year old boys; it seemed like they saw women so infrequently that they just behaved like muppets when they did. They’re worse than that apparently. She’d been groped a fair a bit and someone had walked up to her in the street and shown her porn on their mobile. As a bloke you never see any of this, as nothing like that happens to any woman who is walking with a man. Oddly Ash said that she rejected this tempting advance. You really have to wonder what these men think is going to happen. Though it doesn’t happen here, there are many places where local men hiss at women. Do they expect them to turn round, ‘wow, that makes me horny, let’s go.’ Never in recorded human history has this happened: I think a smile and a hello might just be a better bet.

Day 20
During last night’s Syrian feast, Norbert the Canadian came and introduced himself. He wanted to sign me up for today’s trip to Qala’at Samaan and the Dead Cities. He seemed very nice, sounded just like our Greg and had the same level of optimistic enthusiasm. Sadly I was a bit tired, so as he left the room rather just think it, I said out loud ‘Norbert’s a dragon’s name’. I don’t think he heard.

Zacharia was our driver and he was top value, he even took us to his house for lunch.



Qala’at Samaan is on the site when Simeon lived on top of a succession of pillars for 36 years. At his height point he was 36m up. He got made a saint for his services to pillars. I’m sure there’s more to this, but it all seems pretty bizarre that a 5th century David Blaine was beatified. If anyone should have been made a saint, I think it should have been his support team: someone had to feed him and let’s face it, someone had to clean up after him unless that’s why the pillars kept getting higher. I’m surprised that Monty Python missed out on him. Anyway, whatever the rights and wrongs of Saint Simeon, this is a wonderful place.




I have to say I think LP goes way over the top on the Dead Cities calling them eerie and as if the inhabitants have just wandered off to the shops. A hell of a lot it is rubble, so unless they’re gone to B&Q…….





Day 21
The train to Lattakia was very comfortable and I was soon presented with some headphones endorsed by someone who looks a great deal like Uma Thurman. I didn’t use them for either the local slapstick movie or the follow up-Mr Bean’s holiday. Trying to get my monster bag down from an overhead luggage rack did make me worried I may be about to have a Bean moment. I didn’t see much of the scenery I took the train for as I didn’t have a window seat and everyone kept closing the windows so they could sleep. But not to worry.

I had to wake the hotel manager up in Lattakia so I could get and room and then head off to Qala’at Saladin. I’m not doing too well at understanding a great deal about some of these places, as LP is a bit skimpy, the Syrians aren’t labelling much and there’s none too many folk about. Still, Crac de Chavalier (planned for Wednesday) must be quite something to be topping this.






Some guy called T.E. Lawrence liked it too.

There was a lot of building going on again, in fact it was just me and the builders on the site. I’m not too sure what to make of this-does ‘rebuilding’ bring the site to life, or is it destructive to the archaeology and the history. Hard to say.

This was my first venture by microbus. They hadn’t really been relevant in Turkey, but it is a really good way of getting around. Minibus type efforts with sliding doors stack up at a kind of bus station. A whole bunch of different routes are serviced and the bus leaves when full (both of mine took 14). The route is fixed, as is the price (10p for my half hour to Al Hafa) and people get on and off on request along the route. What you end up with is a cheap and quick service that isn’t too far off door to door. I think a lot of places could use that.

7 a.m. bus tomorrow after today’s 6 a.m. train. Maybe night buses weren’t so bad…….