Day 25: Silvan/Tatvan/Agri - Genghis

The tent underwent a stunning transformation at some point between sunrise and when I woke up. It became a greenhouse. I wriggled out of my sleeping bag at a little after 6am and lazed on the patio, reading, until Mustafa came out of the house with breakfast at 7.

We spread a kaffiyeh on the grass and ate a great breakfast of cheese, fresh tomatoes, cucumbers and bread. After a couple of rounds of tea and polite nods to Mustafa's students who were gathering at the gate of his house, staring at us through the mesh fence, we packed our gear. Mustafa's two sons came out and smiled shyly at us. Three girls from Mustafa's class opened the gate, walked up and tugged my sleeve.
"Hello mister what is your name?" they said.
"My name's Mike. What's yours?" I replied, knowing full well what the answer would be.
The girls giggled amongst themselves for a few seconds and then one of them stepped forward and beamed up at me.
"Hello mister what is your name?" she said proudly, showing off her English to her classmates who watched from the other side of the fence. I smiled at her and they all fell about laughing.

CL and I slung our gear into Mustafa's car and he dropped us back on the highway. We piled our gear and started thumbing for a lift. After about half an hour, a trucker stopped. He was going half the way to Tatvan and would take us.

Hitching with a trucker always makes me feel like an intruder. Even though they have the most comfort and space, we always had to put our gear on the small cot behind the seats. I always felt a bit bad dumping my dusty bag on the humble sleeping quarters of these guys that drive for days and days on end. We settled into our seats and had gone about 40km when a police checkpoint waved over the truck. The guy went pale. CL and I squirmed in our seats as the police looked at the paperwork and ordered the trucker out of the cab. A few seconds later, he motioned for us to get out. The ride was over. His truck was being impounded. We never found out what the problem was, but we didn't see him clear the checkpoint either, so it must have been pretty serious.

CL and I walked about half a kilometre down the road and then started thumbing again. After a few minutes, an old beaten-up yellow truck swerved to a halt. It was CL's turn to "talk" to the driver. He came running back. We had a ride all the way to Tatvan. Sweet.

Our benefactor's name was Genghis. He was a very placid Kurd in traditional baggy, MC Hammer-style trousers with a pencil moustache and a slow, easy grin. He spoke no English but enthusiastically welcomed us into the cramped space of his cab. His truck was at least twenty years old and the top speed was around 45km/h going downhill. It would take us four or five hours to reach Tatvan at that speed. We settled in for a long trip.

Halfway to Tatvan, we pulled over for a tea break. We were in a valley, mountains rising up on either side of us. A restaurant, nestled into one of the crevices at the cliff wall's base, wanted 6 YTL for a plate of chicken. Rice was an extra 3 YTL. CL and I bought some shitty cake for 2 YTL and shared it over some tea. At first, Genghis protested when we insisted on paying, but he got his own back by sneakily paying for the second round. With only sign language, there was a lot of hand grasping, hand-on-heart and smiling going on. CL and I got out the map and started figuring out where we needed to go from Tatvan.

Tatvan is in the east of Turkey, on the western shore of the immense Lake Van. Heading for Iran, the two most popular routes are either around Lake Van and then over the border at Dogubayazit or taking the ferry from Tatvan to Van on the eastern shore and crossing from there. CL and I were headed for the Georgian border. It's impossible to cross into Armenia from Turkey unless you are a Turkish or Armenian national. The border between the two countries is closed to foreigners. The most popular border point from Turkey into Georgia is Sarp, which crosses from northern central Turkey into western Georgia, on the coast of the Black Sea, headed for the town of Batumi. We were headed for the less travelled, almost-invisible-on-the-map border town of Posof. This would put us into central southern Georgia, about 20km from the town of Achalciche (pronounced A-hal-see-heh). From there it was a straight shot to Tbilisi, from which we would head for Yerevan and Nagorno Karabakh.

Genghis watched us tracing our possible route over the face of the map and touched my wrist. He pointed to the town of Agri, another six hours or so north of Tatvan. He pointed to himself and then again at Agri. Then he made the collecting motion with his hands that indicated all of us. He was going to Agri. He could take us all the way there. We were in luck.

Knowing that we were to be slung together for ten or so hours of grindingly slow trucking created a very relaxed, brotherly atmosphere in the cab of Genghis's truck. He would look at us out of the corner of his eye and smile every so often, or watch CL and I talking and laugh when we laughed. Even though the truck was choking and coughing along at a snail's pace, none of us felt impatient or dissatisfied. Genghis would make a show of unplugging the tachometre whenever we cleared a checkpoint and we would all laugh at the small gesture of screwing the authorities. The tachometre measures the distance a trucker travels. Other than that, I have no idea what it does or why it is used. All I know is that unplugging it gave Genghis a great deal of mischievious excitement which CL and I enjoyed sharing with him.

The landscape changed from plains and rolling hills to mountains. On a 10:1 incline, the truck moved at roughly walking pace. We crested the mountains and descended onto the road that skirts Lake Van's western shore. Lake Van is huge, and on the other side, snow-capped mountains rise, blocking the way to Iran, making the idea of that journey incredibly exotic.

We pulled into a truck stop on the shore of Lake Van. CL and I got out to take some pictures and stretch our legs. Genghis headed straight for the tea. The air was clean and cold, the snowy mountains in the distance reminding me that I was leaving behind the hot climate I had become used to in the past weeks. I put on a sweatshirt. Climbing down from the cab of the truck after getting my sweatshirt, I heard a loud hissing sound. As I walked along the hindquarters of the truck, the sound got louder. It was coming from one of the wheels. I looked closer. There was a tear in one of the tyres approximately the size of my thumb. A large tear. I put my palm up to the hole and felt the air blasting out of it. I called over CL. His eyes went wide when he saw the hole in the tyre. My head filled with images of standing around for hours as Genghis jacked up the truck somehow and changed the tyre. Genghis came out of the tea hut adjusting his Hammer trousers. We waved him over and pointed to the tear in the tyre. He shrugged and grinned. Let's go, he motioned with his hands. I pointed again at the tyre and made a big pantomime of how much air was gushing out of it. Genghis grinned and gave me the "no problem" shrug. CL and I climbed back into the cab of that truck completely convinced that the tyre would blow out or go flat within the hour. Genghis was smiling and started singing. At the time, it felt like I was in the truck with a crazy man, but looking back, I should have realised that a man does not drive a twenty-odd year old truck for a living without figuring out how it works. There was a reason he was smiling and singing. Eventually, when a huge bang followed by fishtailing and death didn't happen, CL and I relaxed.

We were now headed north, along the shore of Lake Van and up towards the town of Agri, probably the last town in Turkish Kurdistan before the invisible border is crossed and Turkey becomes fundamentally Turkish again. Genghis was singing, loud and clear, an endless procession of folk songs and what I assume were religious songs. After every few of his, he would motion for us to sing. CL doesn't sing on principle and, like most Westerners, I have no idea of folk or traditional songs from my culture. Apart from "You Fat Bastard" and "99 Bottles of Beer", what traditional songs are there in England? I don't know "Auld Lang Syne", and besides, isn't that Scottish? Genghis made it clear that the singing was a reciprocal deal, so I dredged my skull for a song I could sing. Over the course of the next couple of hours, Genghis shared a treasure trove of traditional Kurdish and Muslim songs with us that were delicate, lilting and beautiful. In return, I serenaded him with "I Wanna Be Like You" from The Jungle Book, "Bohemian Rhapsody" by Queen, "Angel of Death" by Slayer and a short excerpt from "The Song That Never Ends", a very annoying ditty I picked up as a child from watching Lamb Chop's Play-along. Genghis listened intently to each one of my offerings and then applauded warmly when I concluded or, more commonly, ran out of lyrics that I could recall. I felt like I was cheating him somehow.

Night fell as we approached the limits of Agri. CL and I didn't want to be dropped in the town centre, since that would impinge on our autostopping capabilities come morning. Genghis rolled into a petrol station just outside of the town. He told us that he was going to sleep and would be leaving at 5am. One of us was welcome to sleep in the cab with him but the loser would have to sleep in one of the empty rooms in the petrol station. The rooms in question were fronted by a thin glass window and were still under construction. I had warmer gear so I drew the short straw. The room was very cold. CL snuggled up in the cab of the truck with Genghis. I arranged my sleeping bag and rucksack in such a way as to provide me the most warmth. I wrapped my jacket around my head and lay there, waiting for sleep.

Day 24: Qamishli/Nusaybin, Turkey/Kiziltepe/Mardin/Diyarbakir/Silvan - "Hello mister what is your name?"

The time arrived to leave Syria. It was 10 am. The border was now open. CL and I shook off the cobwebs of a truly awful night's sleep, picked up our gear and headed for the Turkish border.

We walked through Qamishli as it was waking up, reached the ring road and found a guy with a pick-up truck who was up for driving us to the border. We jumped in.

At the border, the Syrians were, as always, incredibly nice but also very slow. We waited for the right guy to arrive, then waited until we were invited into his office and then waited again while he perused our passports with a cheerful but slothful indifference. Eventually, satisfied that our passports weren't out of a Mafia printing press, he opened the Big Book and began to ask the all-too-familiar questions.
"Father's name?"
We told him.
"Mother's name?"
We told him.
"Occupation?"
"Genius," I said. CL choked on a guffaw, turning it into a cough.
The official paused, the pen hovering tantalisingly close to the paper. We were almost through.
"What is your job?" he asked again.
"Jen-yoos," I said. CL coughed again. The official scribbled into the book.
"And you?" he asked, pointing the tip of the pen at CL.
"Dreamer," said CL. It was my turn to cough.
Again, the official paused, pen hovering.
"Dah-ree-mehr," CL elaborated.
The official nodded and wrote in the book.

We emerged from the office and waited for our passports to be stamped. The border guards took their time, examining our passports not out of official scrutiny but out of curiosity. CL and I took turns using their toilet and then play-fought behind the customs desk while the guard toyed with the notion of stamping us out of Syria. Eventually, the ink pad was squelched and our passports were stamped. We were out of Syria.

We walked through the barriers and up through the parking lot that leads to the Turkish customs hut. For the first time in weeks, I was looking at buildings and windows that didn't have Bashar al-Assad's photograph on them. It felt weird.

Once we were inside Turkey, we walked into the town of Nusaybin, a border town mirroring Qamishli's size and location but with no indication of the bustling nightlife. A group of kids shouted "Hello mister what is your name?" and then ran off, giggling. Nusaybin, like most of the places we would pass through on the way to Georgia, was in the area of Turkey known to everyone but the Turks as Kurdistan. The population are almost entirely Kurdish, most of them speak what is known as Kurdish to outsiders (minor point of pedantry - there actually isn't a language called Kurdish; the Kurdish people have many different languages corresponding to different sects, such as Kurmanji and Soranji). Until fairly recently, it was illegal in Turkey to speak Kurdish, write Kurdish, teach Kurdish, have a radio station in Kurdish or make any references to the existence of a separate and distinct people known as Kurds. Mostly due to the desire of the Turks to join the EU, those restrictions have been lifted, although in practice the open speaking of Kurdish is still cause for heated arguments in Turkey proper.

Passing through the main square, CL and I paused to marvel at a statue of Ataturk. Ataturk is revered in Turkey to the point of being worshiped. His statues, busts, portraits and quotes are everywhere. On the YTL notes, the older Ataturk glares up from the paper in an attitude that for some reason always reminds me of Peter Cushing. This particular statue of Ataturk was interesting because it was surrounded by red and gold plaques that gave the entire thing a very Chinese feel. As CL and I took photos, a young boy ran past and shouted "Hello mister what is your name?" and then took off.

We stopped by an internet cafe to check on the status of our CouchSurfing requests for Armenia. The owner of the cafe was eating a very delicious-looking meal. CL and I suddenly realised that we were very hungry. The owner very kindly ordered food for us and, for 2.50 YTL, it was the most reasonable meal we ate the entire time we were in Turkey. As we ate, we told him where we were headed and he arranged for his son to walk us to the bus stop that would take us to the edge of town. One of the great things about the Turkish language is that, unlike Arabic, there is a specific word for hitchhiking - autostop - which made explaining what we were up to much easier.

The minibus dropped us at the edge of town at a petrol station. We piled our gear up to make it look as minimal as possible from the road and then began thumb-jockeying. We were picked up by Erhan, a Kurdish travelling pharmaceutical supplies salesman. He was on his way to take a few meetings and happily agreed to drive us as far as he was going as long as we didn't mind waiting for twenty minutes here and there while he met his customers.

Our first pit stop was in Kiziltepe, a small town with a broad main drag. I dashed into the local hospital to make use of their toilet and was surprised to find that the Middle Eastern habit of never turning on the lights until nighttime also applied to hospitals.

Our next stop was Mardin, a great town built on a mountain with an old fortress on the summit. From pretty much anywhere in Mardin, you have a glorious view of Turkish Kurdistan. Another highlight of our visit to Mardin was the local supermarket. One of my favourite things about Turkey is its amazingly high instance of wildly inappropriate product names.

Erhan dropped us off at the autostop in Diyarbakir, the capital of Turkish Kurdistan. The autostop was a junction just outside of the city centre. We were heading east, towards Lake Van. We bought some food. As we walked in and out of a couple of stores, I became very aware of the eyes of every person there being glued to us. The men sitting around playing crackgammon and drinking tea, the women in small clusters talking amongst themselves and, most of all, the children. The children followed us en masse, not just with their eyes. As CL and I set up our gear by the side of the road and started thumbing, a crowd of about ten or fifteen kids had gathered. After five minutes in that spot, there were thirty or forty kids. They stood very close, all around us, occasionally shouting "Hello mister what is your name?". Nobody stopped for us. What motorist in their right mind would stop for two scraggly-assed travellers in filthy clothes and a horde of staring, gesticulating children? The kids were very sweet but they didn't grasp the concept of hitchhiking. They just clustered around us, sticking out their thumbs when we did, laughing when CL and I looked at each other, shaking our heads. Eventually we had to decamp to a different spot. As we walked down the hill along the side of the highway, the kids followed us. All of them. I felt like the Pied Piper. About a kilometre from where we started, all the children suddenly stopped following us, as if an invisible wall had sprung up in their way. On the other side of the road, a new group of children were waiting to walk with us. There was obviously a territorial issue in play of which we weren't aware.

There was a filthy stream clotted with garbage at the foot of the hill. A convenience store backed onto the stream bed. We dropped our bags. I went to the store to get a piece of cardboard to write our destination on. The owner and his employee were very nice and insisted that I sit down and let them hitch for us. CL and I sat by as the store clerk waved down cars until one finally stopped. There were two students inside on their way back to their dorm. They would give us a lift four kiolmetres or so up the road. He crammed our gear into the boot and back seat and clambered in.

The students dropped us next to a police checkpoint. They told us that the police would help us. Sure enough, right after the car pulled away, before the dust even had time to settle, the police captain came out of the checkpoint hut in his vest, drying his arms. We told him we were going to Tatvan. He put on his shirt, strapped on his gun and started flagging down trucks for us. After ten minutes, he told us to come inside for tea. It was getting dark, so CL stayed by the road and I went inside. There were four or five officers inside the hut, talking and laughing. They brought out the tea in the traditional two-tiered teapot. The bottom pot has hot water in it. The tea is poured into the cup until it is about two-thirds full and then the final third is made up of hot water so that the tea won't be too bitter. I was just lifting the cup to my lips when CL burst in. We had a ride.

Our ride was a schoolteacher named Mustafa who lived 12 kilometres east, just outside the town of Silvan. He spoke some English and was keen to practice it.
"Perhaps I invite you to eat at my home tonight?" Mustafa asked.
"We'd love to sleep at your house," CL replied, not realising that he had misheard the invitation.
"Oh," Mustafa said, "yes, sleep at my home tonight. You are welcome."
CL beamed back at me and I winced. The Kurds are a very hospitable people and so are the Muslims. Muslim Kurds are exceptionally polite and helpful. Mustafa was a very religious man and, since we had requested shelter, couldn't refuse us even though it hadn't been what he meant. We had hijacked a crash pad.

We pulled off the highway onto a dirt road that shuddered and bounced us two more kilometres to his house. Mustafa lived in a one room house adjacent to the school at which he taught. He was married and had two children. All four of them lived together in a tiny house that had a squat toilet, a sink and a modest living room where they all slept. Mustafa never invited us into the house because his wife was inside and had no scarf to cover herself with. We sat on the stoop of his house, spread out one of CL's kaffiyehs as a tablecloth and ate a delicious chicken stew with rice. Before we could go to use the toilet, Mustafa would tell his wife we were coming and then go wash the toilet and sink. His children came out of the house to stare at us shyly or sit on their father's lap. We took out the crackgammon board CL had bought in Damascus and played for hours. Mustafa was very curious about life in England. He told us about his teaching. We talked about religion and Mustafa, a very quiet, delicate man with a painfully soft voice, told me with a beatific smile how wonderful it would be if Turkey had Sharia law.
"I am Muslim," he said. "Of course I would like Sharia law here."

We set up our tent in his front yard and bedded down for the night. Mustafa quietly left us a bottle of water to wash with and told us that during the night we were welcome to perform our functions in the backyard.

Day 23: Palmyra/Qamishli - You Are Dealing With A Real Professional

Captain Libya had already been to the ruins earlier on his trip, so Nick and I headed over there first thing without him, stopping on the way for a great falafel that cost us 15 Syrian pounds. The streets of Palmyra still had that slightly eerie ghost town feel. As we walked along the ring road that leads from the town centre to the gateway to the ruins, shops began to open and we could see people going about their business. I felt less and less like Clint Eastwood was going to step out of a saloon door with a stoveplate underneath his poncho. The air was heating up. Even at ten in the morning it was oppressively hot. The sun glared off of the sand.

The road from the town curved into a gate randomly placed in the middle of a rock-strewn desert. Coming through the gate, the first impression is of a massive amount of space. The desert stretches out ahead and on both sides, broken only by hills to the right and a restaurant to the left. The columns of the ruins are lined up at odd angles, some parallel to the road, some in the far distance in a straight line, marking a long-forgotten intersection. The effect is incredible. Surrounded by the desert, you don't feel like you're at a ruin so much as in a city that has been partially swallowed by sand. In much the same way as Baalbek, the stones are left where they fell, poking out of the sand, haphazardly laying on top of one another.

One building still standing was gated off. Through the bars we could see a tree growing in the middle of the square atrium that was protected by the walls. Why that particular thing was gated was a mystery.

Nick and I picked our way through the ruins, pausing for photos and to admire the desert vistas, carefully choosing angles where the proud, defiant columns concealed the hideous antennas erected on hilltops in the background. The antennas weren't hideous of themselves, it was just that having modern technology so close to a place like this felt very intrusive. Even the arrival of a tour bus made me wince, so harshly did it interrupt the calm of the desert and the placidity of the fallen buildings. Our only companions as we wandered around were an old man on a bicycle selling water at exorbitant captive-audience prices and two camel riders trying to get us to buy rides on their camels.
"I've ridden a camel before," I said.
"Where?"
"In Morocco."
"But this is a Syrian camel," came the optimistic reply. "It's different."
"How do you know?" I asked. "Have you ridden a Moroccan camel?"
"Look at his face," the rider said. "He likes you."
The camel grunted at me. Nick and I squinted up at the two guys silhouetted against the sun. We shared a moment there, the four of us, and then they clicked their tongues and rode off, hoping for better luck with the tour group pulling in.

My suspicion that Palmyra is a uniquely touristy town was confirmed when, as we left the ruins, I stopped at a kiosk to get some water.
"How much is a large bottle of water?" I asked.
"120 Syrian pounds," the shopkeeper said.
I was so surprised by his bald-faced lies that I didn't even try to be polite.
"No it's not," I said. "The price is 25."
The shopkeeper shrugged, unashamed. "Okay," he said, getting up to open the fridge.
I gave him a hundred. He gave me back fifty. I waited for a few seconds. He had sat back down and was about to open up his paper.
"Excuse me," I said. "You still need to give me 25 more."
He gave the same 'oh, you got me' shrug and put ten Syrian pounds into the change tray. He went back to his paper. I waited another moment. Nothing.
"Excuse me," I said. "You still need to give me 15 more."
He eyed me coldly. "No I don't."
"100 minus 25 is 75," I began. "50 plus 10 is 60. You owe me another 15."
He sighed, gave me the shrug again and put 15 pounds into the change tray. I got the feeling that my adding skills wouldn't alter his business strategy in the long run. He had the look of a career short-changing over-charger.

Nick and I got back to the hotel and roused CL from his stupour. We got our gear together and headed over to the patch of dirt/convenience store/restaurant/CD stall that acts as Palmyra's bus station. The bus that CL and I needed to get to Deir es-Zur was just about to leave. Over the blare of Arabic pop from the CD stall and the consistent stream of good-natured but intrusive "Hello mister what is your name?", CL managed to get us our tickets and we were off.

The Syrian bus system is a strange animal. On the one hand, the "system" is chaotic, departure times highly negotiable, journey time and pleasance varying according to how close to death the driver is willing to bring himself and his cargo. On the other hand, every bus I took in Syria offered free water, free candies and biscuits and at least one in-drive DVD, usually a mix of music videos from television. The guy who comes around with the candies and water is always very nice and lingers by foreigners to ask questions and proudly demonstrate his English. On this occasion, the movie on offer was an incredibly lame stalker/horror movie called either P2 or P3 starring Wes Bentley as a deranged parking lot security guard who kidnaps and tortures a woman on Christmas Eve. The irony of watching a violent American Christmas movie on an afternoon bus filled with families in a country purported to be fundamentalist and anti-Western was not lost on me. One wide-eyed youngster only ever dragged his eyes off the screen for long enough to stare at me and stick an exploratory finger into his nose or mouth for a few seconds every half hour or so.

The film finished sucking by ending, roughly around the time we pulled into Deir es-Zur bus station. Beaten into intellectual torpor by substandard American schlock, CL and I staggered off the bus, liberated our luggage from the hold and blinked in the sunlight. We asked around for the bus company going to Qamishli. We were directed to one of the offices that fronted onto the bus station forecourt. Inside, a sleepy-eyed man looked blankly at us from behind a glass window. To his right, a fat man was slowly counting money and picking his nose. Behind them, the wall bore a large photograph of an optimistically clean bus marked with their decal. The caption said "You Are Dealing With A Real Professional". I suppressed a snigger and reached for my camera. CL asked about tickets to Qamishli. We were told that the next bus left at 17:00. It was 16:45. We produced money and passports. Fat Man stopped picking his nose for long enough to take our passports and go to the police hut nearby where a signature was required to obtain our tickets. No explanation was ever given for this and not every bus journey required a signature. We came to the conclusion that the police wanted to practice their English and were curious about our passports. The office was shockingly stuffy. CL and I slowly dehydrated. The sleepy-eyed man served other customers with sleepy eyes. I went to the toilet, a dilapidated hut on the other side of the forecourt that had the most flies in one place I had ever seen.

When I got back, Fat Man was still at large with our passports. It was now 16:55. The bus was due to leave at 17:00. I went to look for Fat Man. He was on his way to us. We were ready to go, subject to the laboriously slow writing of the tickets by the sleepy-eyed man. After all, we were dealing with professionals. I went to get us some food from the falafel stand.

The falafel stand was abandoned unless you count flies. I asked in the shop next door. They said to wait ten minutes. It was 16:57. We didn't have ten minutes. I was hungry and exasperated.
"I'll make it," I said. The men sitting in the shop stared with saucer-eyes.
I walked behind the counter and surveyed the goods on offer. We would be able to enjoy two of Syria's finest warm salad and cold chip rolls. I lined up the two circles of pitta and began filling them. CL arrived at the scene and started laughing. The men from the store were also laughing. The bus honked.
"We have to go," CL shouted.
"Just a minute," I said, frantically trying to fold over the two monsters that I had created. In a very short space of time, I learned that the deft, minimal movements with which falafel stand guys roll their rolls are not as easy as they look. I felt like I ad ten thumbs. CL was yelling at the bus driver to wait and then motioning at me while laughing. The falafel guy arrived with a confused look on his face. He stepped into the breach and finished the sandwiches for us. I dropped 10 Syrian on the counter and CL and I bolted for the bus. As I ran, the bulging, warped concrete surface of the road rose up against me and I twisted my ankle. Swearing, limping and clutching an overstuffed, soggy roll, I got onto the bus.

A few minutes after we pulled away, as CL and I sat there enjoying our tasty sandwiches, the water guy came around. We asked about the onboard entertainment. It was going to be a Jean Claude Van Damme prison drama in Russian. As we raced through the desert towards the Syrian border, drooling warm chunks of tomato and cold stiff chips, surrounded by families and curious children with huge eyes, Arabic pop blaring over the speaker system over the muted sounds of the television, Jean Claude Van Damme's wife was brutally assaulted and murdered. The scene was lurid, the sex graphic and, as some critics would call it, uncompromising. A bus load of women in chadhors watched with their husbands and children as her skirt was lifted, her underwear torn away, her body revealed. The men leaned forward in their seats, necks craned. Their wives watched them watching the screen impassively from behind black veils, wrapped in ankle length black duffle coats in the 30 degree heat. The children stared at us and sucked their fingertips. CL and I speculated briefly on what Jean Claude's fate would be in prison after he avenged his wife's murder and then I fell asleep.

We arrived in Qamishli a few hours later. CL woke me up and informed me that I had correctly predicted the ending of the film. I was not surprised. Say what you want about Jean Claude, but at least he offers consistency.


At Qamishli bus station, a horde of taxi drivers descended on us. We got to a cafe, dumped our bags and held an open bidding. Everyone wanted far too much to take us to a cheap hotel so we walked out of the station and down the road. Within a few dozen metres we were again surrounded by drivers. Five of them gathered around us.
"Okay," I said. "We're going to the centre to find a hotel. How much?"
"Fifty," they all said in unison.
CL and I haggled briefly and then decided to continue on our way. Another dozen or so metres down the road, one of the drivers caught up to us.
"Thirty," he said.
Deal.

We were dropped in the centre of Qamishli, a fairly typical and heaving border town. The cheap hotel we had asked for was above an abandoned shopping arcade. We struggled to the top of the stairs and asked how much the beds were.
"250 each," we were told.
CL had been told the beds were 100 each. We argued but to no avail. On either side of the reception desk, wide hallways led to rows of rooms. In folding chairs spaced along the walls, single men sat talking and smoking, occasionally looking at the television blaring in the corner. Either because of inferior speaker quality or a distaste for volume reduction, everything blares in Syria, whether it is radio, television, muezzin, car horns. They all produce a startlingly similar cacophonous blare.
CL had failed to get a lower price out of the dour clerk at the reception desk and so had I.
"What about the roof?" CL asked in a moment of brilliance. In Syria, it is common for hotels to let travellers sleep on the roof for a fraction of the room price.
"We don't have a roof," the dour clerk replied without missing a beat. We were doomed to pay the rack rate. We agreed to pay the asking price. While I waited for the clerk to finish with our passports and the mandatory secret police questionnaire, CL employed a unique money-saving tactic and went to sleep to avoid the need to buy food for dinner. The clerk looked at me over his glasses.
"Father's name?"
I told him.
"Mother's name?""
I told him.
"Occupation?"
I paused. I had a rare opportunity.
"Genius," I said.
The clerk looked at me over his glasses. "What is this job?" he asked.
I repeated myself, altering the pronunciation to suit the Syrian tongue, putting a little more firmness into my voice. "Jen-yoos," I said.
The clerk shrugged and wrote it into the book. I went out for a walk.

Qamishli is the type of town that looks dirty and unremarkable in daylight but, under the artificially lit glow of night, takes on a sleazy border town charm. I walked through the dark back streets, found the main drag and walked up and down it a couple of times, soaking up the ambience. Baklava shops, mobile phone stores and lingerie stalls were all doing a roaring trade at ten in the evening. The weight of the day sat on me suddenly and I went back to the hotel and crawled into bed. The linen was a paper thin sheet and a scratchy wool blanket. The sheet was too thin to sleep under on its own and the wool scratched even through the sheet. The room was also very stuffy. The ceiling fan stirred the warm air around and also wobbled dangerously in its casing, giving me the feeling that it might come loose in our sleep and slice our heads off. I struggled to find a configuration of blanket and sheet that wasn't appallingly uncomfortable. The riddle about the boatman with the goat, the wolf and the cabbage came to mind.

In the hallway, men shouted at each other in Arabic and practiced for the underappreciated Olympic event of door-slamming. Somehow, skin itching, back sweating, head pounding, eyes swollen, ears cringing at the shouting and slamming, I fell asleep.

Day 22: Damascus/Qunetra/Palmyra - "Brucely!"

Captain Libya and I got up early, packed up our gear and headed into the business district of Damascus to locate the Ministry of the Interior.  Nick met us halfway, just outside the National Museum, and together we set out to unravel the mystery of the location of the bureaucratic temple in question.

Locating anything in an Arabic country is a mission for several reasons.  To begin with, there are no street signs anywhere and what signs there are usually happen to be written in Arabic, unsurprisingly.  It's my own damn fault for not knowing their language.  Also, Arabs are by nature a very helpful people, the Syrians especially, and therefore they would never dream of telling you that they don't know where something is.  It's bad hospitality to not give directions, so they always tell you where to go, even if it's completely the wrong way.  Several such helpful pedestrians had us tramping around and around the main roundabout at the edge of the government/diplomatic district.  The street we were looking for, depending on who we asked, was either east, north, west, south or didn't exist.  At the Goethe Institute, the receptionist spoke only Arabic and German.  Again, my fault.  I shouldn't have assumed with typical Western arrogance that anyone representing a Western European nation would speak English.  We eventually saw, in the distance, perched behind a stand of trees like a hidden house of worship, the only place where we were guaranteed answers.  The Sheraton.  Surely within the hallowed five-star walls of this bastion of taste and multilingual staff resided at least one individual who knew the location of the Ministry of the Interior.  We walked through the trees that separated the pristine white walls from the grubby gazes of the proletariat, surprised a gardener by acknowledging him with a smile, something he clearly wasn't used to from the upmarket clientele, and I entered the lobby through sliding doors that, as I crossed the threshhold, seemed to whisper "Welcome" to me in a solicitously sensuous fashion.  The guard at the metal detector took one look at my hair and beard and waved me through.

I located the Travel & Tourism desk.  The man on the other side of it smoked in what I can only describe as a louche manner.  He had a ponytail, a shirt left open low enough to reveal the mandatory tuft of chest hair and a gold bracelet that winked at me at the same time that he did.  I sat down.  He got off the phone at a leisurely pace.  He dragged on his cigarette and eyed me wolfishly.  I asked about the Minstry of the Interior.  His reply sank my heart like my brother used to sink my battleship.
"Which one?"
"There's more than one Ministry of the Interior?  How many interiors does Syria have?"
My sarcasm was neither acknowledged nor appreciated.
"You have map?"
I went outside to get the map of Damascus from CL.  He and Nick were standing in the shade, chatting happily and getting the fish-eye from the security guard.  I re-entered the lobby through the sliding doors.
"Welcome," whispered the doors.
I returned to the desk.  The guy showed me where the two ministries were.  One was a ten minute walk.  The other was on the other side of Damascus and, as he told me, was probably not the one I wanted.  I explained that we wanted to go to the village of Qunetra.  He had no idea which ministry we needed.  I slunk out.  The Sheraton had failed me.  Its pristine walls and tastefully landscaped gardens were a fraud.
"Welcome," whispered the doors ironically as I left.

CL, Nick and I walked up the length of the street the guy had marked and we found nothing.  Time was passing.  It would take us a good hour or so to make it to Qunetra.  The day was warming itself towards the noon crescendo.  We were sweaty, lost and exasperated.  In the style of most sweaty, lost, exasperated men in a foreign land, we decided that surely the lack of a permission slip could be overcome by a stylishly distributed item of hard currency.  This was to prove a futile and disastrous decision for which I take my fair share of blame.

We set off for the Baramke bus garage, the patch of asphalt underneath the flyover in east Damascus from which most minibuses depart.  We asked a pedestrian for directions.
"Where is Baramke garage?" CL asked.
"You need a bus?" the pedestrian replied.  Of course, we didn't here the inflection of the question mark, so it sounded like "You need a bus."
"Where from?" CL asked.
The pedestrian looked understandably puzzled.  "Where to?" he asked.
"Baramke garage." CL said.
"Where to?" the pedestrian asked.
I was getting an Abbott & Costello feeling.  We walked up the ramp to the main road and flagged down a minibus.
"Baramke garage?" I asked.
The driver pointed at the floor, usually the signal for us to get in.
"Hey guys," I called to CL and Nick.  "This guy's going to Baramke."
We climbed into the minibus.  The driver stared at us like we were lepers.
"Baramke?" I asked again.  The driver repeated his motion.  CL made the "let's go" motion.  The driver looked perplexed.
"Baramke," the driver said, pointing to the floor.
Nick, CL and I all said "Baramke!" in unison and nodded.
The four of us shared a pregnant pause.  Then, somewhere distant, perhaps behind the amygdala, a very small, dim light bulb switched itself on.
"Is this Baramke?" I asked, pointing to the pavement outside the minibus.
"Baramke, Baramke," the driver said in relief, pointing to the pavement.
We descended from the bus, suitably shamed by our idiocy.  We asked the driver for the bus to Qunetra.  He told us to go to the ashpalt lot beneath the flyover.  We did.  Down there, another guy sent us back up the ramp.  This repeated itself a couple of times until eventually CL shouted to Nick and I and motioned wildly.
"This guy goes to Qunetra!"
We were on our way.

The minibus actually stopped a few kilometres from Qunetra and we had to change.  The new bus was waved over by a police checkpoint.  By checkpoint, I mean a bench under a tree by the side of the road.  By police, I mean a guy in black jeans and a shirt half-unbuttoned idly carrying a semi-automatic weapon.
"Permission?" the guy said, hand outstretched.
The time had come to play the game of Stupid Tourist.
"What?" I asked.
"Permission," he said.
We handed him our passports.  He looked at them, turned them over in his hand and then asked for our permission again.
"You speak English?" I asked him.
He nodded.
"What permission?" I asked.
"Permission," he said, nodding.
I was getting that Abbott & Costello feeling again.
"We need permission?" I said, righteously surprised as only someone clearly lying can be.
He nodded and nonchalantly adjusted his gun on his shoulder.  I swallowed.  Gulp.  We persisted with our claims that we had no idea we needed permission.  The guy walked off, called someone, came back.
"Permission," he said again.  This was going nowhere.
"Can we go without permission?" I asked.
He looked at me like I'd just sneezed out a leprechaun.  I repeated my question.  He shook his head.  I persisted.  He told us to get out of the minibus.  We did.  The bus drove off.  He went and sat down on the bench, took out some sunflower seeds and started to crack and spit.
"Can we go to Qunetra?" CL asked.
He shook his head.  Crack.  Spit.
"Please?" asked Nick.
Shake.  Crack.  Spit.
Eventually he stopped acknowledging our presence and just cracked and spat.  We crossed the street and waited for a bus back to Damascus.

Upon our return, CL and I made a beeline for the souk.  We stopped off at a packed ice cream parlour and had two gigantic cones of vanilla ice cream coated in pistachios.  It was pure hedonism.
As we walked through the crowd towards my crackgammon buddies, my moaning in between slurps of ice cream got me several filthy looks.  CL wanted a real backgammon set and I figured that only the old men would be able to get us a good price.  On the way, we stopped off at a shop just to get an idea of the price.  The guy showed us a selection of boards and the cheapest one started at 4500 Syrian (60 euros).  When we turned to leave the price dropped to 3500.  We kept walking.  Akram and Bashar took us to a shop around the corner.  As soon as Bashar walked in, the shopkeeper came out, salaamed, took his hand and listened intently as Bashar informed him that CL and I were visiting backgammon dignitaries and wanted a really good board for a really good price.  With no negotiations, CL walked out ten minutes later with a beautiful board for 1500 Syrian.  We promptly retired to the khan for tea and gammon.  CL used the power of the new board to whip me good and proper.  My losing streak continued over the ensuing hours and through gallons of tea.  At one point, Akram simply cried "WHY?", dropped the mouthpiece of his argileh pipe in disgust and retired to his store for half an hour.  When he came back he immediately began helping me with my game.
"Mike, you played so beautifully before.  What happened?"  The outrage in his voice was almost comical.  My opponent made a bad move and, distracted, I missed the countermove.  My opponent sat on one of my pieces.
"NO!" cried Akram, jumping up.  "We do not accept!"  He moved the guy's piece back and corrected my previous move.  I told Akram I didn't mind losing if I missed a move.  He wagged his finger at me passionately.  "We do not accept!" he said again firmly.  I dutifully did my move over with the requisite correction.  I still lost.

We said our goodbyes to the old men in the courtyard.  Akram, Bashar and I shared a moment together.  I felt very strongly that they had really taught me something about backgammon.  Their welcoming nature and willingness to share their time and their tea with me had somehow gotten to me in a very short space of time.  Bassam demanded that we all have a picture together.  They gathered neatly into a row and I dived in front of them, beaming and with my arms spread wide.  Akram elicited a promise from me to send him the picture.  He gave me his card with his email address.  We shook hands and shared a moment.  As CL and I headed back into the heaving good-natured mess of the souk, they stood in the courtyard, waving until we rounded the corner.

Nick, CL and I got back to Ammar's apartment at about 18:00.  We packed, locked up and went to the Shahbandar Palace to return the keys and thanks Ammar.  He accepted the keys and told me it was a pleasure to meet me.
"The pleasure was all mine," I said.  "Thank you so much, really."
Ammar made a pained face.  "Stop thanking me," he said.  "This is how we do things."
We shook hands warmly.  CL, Nick and I went to the bus station and got the next bus to Palmyra.

Palmyra sits in the desert a good two or three hours northeast of Damascus.  It was to be our last official stop on the way to Turkey.  The road from Palmyra continues up to Deir es-Zur, a small depressing little town of little note other than that the Euphrates river passes through it and during the Armenian genocide, it was one of the gathering places for refugees.  Palmyra is also a sleepy little town, but the presence of the world famous ruins, one of Syria's strongest tourist draws, has given the town a Wild West feel.  Every other doorway is selling overpriced souvenirs or expensive food for triple or quadruple what the actual cost should be.  The dust from the ruins blows through the town and at night, with very little open, walking around has an eerie feeling, almost like spacewalking.

We checked into the Baal Shameen Hotel.  The reception area was empty except for a sleepy looking guy with ginger hair watching a DVD.  There is a surprisingly large number of ginger Syrians, by the way.  Far more than in any other dark-haired country I've been too.  The guy gave us a room with three beds.  We dumped our gear and went out for a walk.  It was dark and the streets were deserted except for a lone food vendor, grilling chicken in a barbecue made from half an oil barrel.  The chicken was excellent.

Back at the Baal Shameen, we settled in to drink some tea and play some crackgammon.  In the background, our ginger friend watched his film.  Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed it was Game of Death.  He was watching the scene where Bruce Lee, replete in yellow jumpsuit, gets footprinted by Kareem Abdul Jabbar.  When the shot of Jabbar stnding up came onscreen, I pointed at the screen and said "Kareem Abdul Jabbar".  The ginger guy looked at me like I was crazy. He pointed at the screen.
"Brucely!" he said, offended.  "Brucely!"
I nodded.  "I know," I replied.  "The other guy is Kareem Abdul Jabbar."
The ginger guy shook his head.  "Brucely!" he announced definitively and hunched back down onto the couch, arms crossed.

As we played, I became aware of the fact that he was skipping through to only the fight scenes.  During the course of our games, he managed to watch all of Brucely's fight scenes and move on to Jackie Chan.  I didn't offer a comment.  I got the feeling that I had already insulted him enough.

After about an hour and a half of crackgammon, I started to feel pretty brucely myself, so we finished our tea and went to bed.  In the morning, we would set off for the ruins.

Day 21: Damascus - A Day at the Crack(gammon)house

The braying of vendors and the incessant leaning on car horns were the gentle serenade to which I awoke. Ammar's window looks out onto what passes for a major junction in the Old City. A large restaurant is directly downstairs and the corner is one of the few large enough for two cars to pass each other. Syrians are not known for their reticence when horn-time comes. They provide a very reliable alarm clock, though.

Ammar and Syaman were still asleep, having come back from the internet cafe at god-knows-when. I got dressed, left them a note and headed out to experience my first glimpse of Damascus in the daylight. I got a call from Amir, my buddy from Aleppo. He was in town and had rented a car. I arranged to meet him for lunch at Bab Touma, the main entrance to the Old City. I walked in the noon heat through the winding, serpentine streets of the part of Damascus that has been inhabited for thousands of years. It is recognised as one of the oldest consistently inhabited cities in the world. There are no supermarkets here, or at least not in the conventional sense. There are markets that sell bottles of water and soft drinks and rolls of biscuits that, regardless of flavouring, all seem to taste the same. Fresh produce is sold in strictly compartmentalised sections. There are vegetable sellers who sell vegetables, fruit vendors who vend fruit and bakers selling bread, freshly baked, from tiny hole-in-the-wall operations. Here and there the odd touch of modernity clashes with the Old City feel, from the presence of an internet cafe to the backlit signs proclaiming allegiance to any number of foreign soft drink brands. The air was dusty and the narrowness of the streets meant that any car that passed forced me to plaster myself to the wall. People, as always, were incredibly friendly, waving, saying hello, offering me free samples. One experience that I always have when I travel that was borne out more forcefully on this trip is the fact that the less people have, the more generous they are with it. It makes the acceptance of an offer something that causes a twinge of guilt down deep because you know you are actively taking something they can scarcely afford to spare, but on the other hand the joy they derive from giving is, to them, a fair trade, something which takes a lot of getting used to for someone who grew up in London, where asking for a light gets the same reaction as asking to use someone's mother's mouth as a toilet.

I got to Bab Touma and bought a fresh orange juice from the stall on the very corner of the street that opens up into the square. The Bab Touma itself is a ruin and stands in a fenced-off area in the middle of an internal parking lot, separating the lot from the roundabout that, during my time there, saw an endless stream of traffic. Walking in Damascus is the fastest way of getting around most of the time. The alternative is to be at the mercy of the traffic, the never-ending screeching, honking, steaming, fuming ocean of cars bumper to bumper.

Amir pulled up and I joined him in the car. We looked for a parking space. My conviction that driving in Damascus is ridiculous was confirmed. The only options were to park in a lot which meant giving the keys to a remarkably shifty attendant or to park on the street and risk a ticket for whatever offence the occasional wardens felt like pulling you up on. Amir parked on the street and we went to lunch, which meant getting a shwarma from one of the stalls in the Old City. After having a munch, we walked deeper into the Old City to the Ummayyad Mosque, one of the largest in the world and maintained in pristine condition. Going in through the front entrance, we took off our shoes and were immediately bowled over by the sheer size of the space. The interior is laid out in a massive rectangle. The carpet underfoot is made up of hundreds of individual prayer mats, so that it is clear where one man's praying space ends and another's begins. A digital display in one corner showed the times of the five prayers for that day. The five daily prayers are one of the five pillars of Islam and the timing varies from day to day because they are based on sunrise and sunset.

Towards the front of the mosque was a shrine built around another coffin-shaped object. Green fluorescent light pulsed inside, giving it an eerie glow. Unlike the shrine I had seen in Lebanon, this one had an ingenious addition to make donations easier to handle. Instead of reaching through the mesh to place money on the object within, money could be slipped through a slit in a plastic tube that funneled the money down into a large container.

At the rear of the mosque we stumbled across a rather incongruous item. A baptism font. In a mosque. In Damascus. We were told that the font was very old and represented the time when Syria's Christians not only lived in peace side by side with the Muslims but also shared facilities due to limited space in the Old City.

We wandered out into the courtyard, which for me was the highlight of the mosque. The courtyard was immense and in its centre stood a shrine around which children played and couples walked. The courtyard was finished in smooth marble flagstones and, since we were all barefoot, it was very comfortable to walk around. There was an air of relaxation at this mosque that I haven't usually experienced at mosques. Usually there is a strict separation of men from women, an air of tense piety and a certain subliminal feeling that merriment is to be frowned upon. Here in the courtyard couples walked side by side, groups of women sat and talked, men met and juggled their ubiquitous prayer beads, children ran around shouting and playing, even kicking a ball around, all under the cheerful gaze of the adults. This did not feel like a place of stern religious fervour. It felt like a park in any European city.

As we strolled around, soaking up the atmosphere, Amir told me about his time in Damascus. He explained that he had been receiving an insight into Syrian society that few travellers ever experienced. He had been in Damascus for the best part of ten days and had, by his reckoning, already slept with four Syrian girls, one of whom was a virgin. One girl had even invited him to her family's villa for her mother's birthday party. He talked, shiny-eyed, about the unimaginable wealth the privileged Syrians enjoyed. The girl's apartment had cost 50 million Syrian pounds (about 750,000 euros), an incredible sum by Syrian standards. In a country where 30% of the population are unemployed and the lucky few like my new friend Ammar work six days a week for $400 a month, it seemed obscene. Amir continued to wax lyrical about the virtues of the passionate women who are hidden by their chadhors, apparently seething hotbeds of sexual desire and energy just waiting for the right guy to, ahem, tear aside the veil. The best word for women who wear the chadhors was used by Nick, the cyclist I met in Lattakia. Either as common slang or in a moment of unwitting brilliance, he referred to women who wear the chadhor as "covergirls". Amir had a definite passion for covergirls.

As we wandered out of the mosque, we paused by the side entrance. Amir pointed up at the ancient stone wall.
"Can you see him?"
"Who?" I asked.
"Jesus," he said with a grin.
After a moment, like a magic eye picture, sure enough, the pattern on one of the stones definitely resembled a bearded man in a robe.
"Jesus on the wall of a mosque," Amir said, shaking his head in wonder. "Amazing, isn't it?"

We walked around the mosque to a stall where Amir had previously ordered a pair of name-on-a-grain-of-rice necklaces for one of his ladies. As he was paying, his phone rang. It was his apartment. He had locked his bedroom door and the cleaning lady needed to get in. He said he'd call me later and took off. That was the last time I saw him. I hope it was because he got drawn into a prolonged and steamy encounter with a fiery covergirl. I hope he wasn't busted in flagrante with another virgin and made to pay a hefty price for his penile curiosity.

I walked into the Hammadiyah Souk, the entrance of which is a huge, ancient crumbling gate. It gapes directly across from the main entrance to the Ummayyad Mosque. Perhaps at some point the gates were joined, forming part of a covered walkway. The Hammadiyah Souk was a pleasure because it was not given over to the usual tourist tat, identical at every stall. The Hammadiyah Souk was crowded, packed to the rafters with locals, Damascenes shopping for everyday goods or just out enjoying the vibe. Every storefront declared its goods to the crowd. Hawkers laid out their wares on blankets to either side of the central walkway, making sure not to block the entrances to the shops. Even this wasn't enough. In the very centre of the walkway, kids with plastic toys, balloons and gyroscopes for sale ran demonstrations for small crowds, so that there was nowhere to turn where the wheels of commerce were not in motion. Everybody there was buying or selling something. Nobody grabbed my arm and dragged me into a cousin's carpet shop, like they do in Morocco. I wasn't consistently badgered by people offering assistance only to demand tips if I so much as spoke to them, as they do in Egypt.

Considering the frenzy of business all around me, the souk was an oasis of calm. The most pressure I experienced was when a shopkeeper waved at me and then made the hand gestures that said he was inviting me into his shop for tea. I was about to accept when, down a side alley, in a small internal courtyard just off the souk, a tiny group of shops around a common square that is called a khan, I spied two old guys playing backgammon. Game over. The souk could have been filled with naked two-headed hermaphrodites smoking opium from long-stemmed pipes held for them by dwarves on rollerskates but I still would have made a bee-line for the crackgammon. My addiction is strong, my resistance weak.


I walked into the khan, sat on a packing crate turned on its side and pointed at the board. One of the oldmen looked up.
"You want to play?" he asked.
He spoke English. This was beautiful. I told him that it was not a matter of want. I was a crackgammon addict. I HAD to play. He gave me a funny look but made some room for me to watch as he and his friend went at it.

If you've never watched old Arabic men play backgammon, here are some things that make it incredible to watch:
1) They play ridiculously fast
2) They pick up the dice before you have time to see what your numbers were
3) They seem to know where to put the pieces before the dice have stopped moving
4) They correct each other when the other one misses a good move

Playing against them is the same. After a couple of rounds they invited me to play and were delighted when I showed that I knew how to play the Syrian variation of the game. I sat there for the next six hours. A crowd gathered. As I played, if I didn't see a good move or took too long (i.e. five seconds) to make up my mind, a helpful hand from the crowd would simply reach in and move my pieces. I learnt a huge amount from that afternoon. I was given tea. They knew me by my first name within the first hour. When I left, guys I hadn't even been introduced to were yelling "Hi Mike!" as I walked through the souk. Word travels fast.

About two hours in, a guy named Bassam came and sat down next to me. He spoke no English, was very cheerful, very good at backgammon and talked loudly, rudely and constantly to everyone in the circle around the board. Everyone seemed to like him a lot. When I made a good move, he would give my opponent the Arabic version of the finger, which involves dipping your middle finger as if typing while keeping the rest of the hand normally poised. If they made a bad move he would shout something in Arabic and then laugh at them. He was a riot. The old man who spoke English was named Akram. Akram had learnt English on the street. In addition to English and Arabic he also spoke French and Italian. He made a living selling the base ingredients for perfume wholesale. When Nick, the cyclist from Lattakia, randomly showed up, Akram sorted him out with a Syrian SIM card in no time.

Late in the afternoon, as the frenzy of the crowd in the souk at the end of the alley seemed to be dying down, my phone rang. Captain Libya had arrived. I met him at the Ummayyad and brought him back to my new hangout where he was introduced to "the boys", a group of men whose average age was double my actual age. The person I played the most against that first day was a guy named Bashar who spoke decent English, but being shy and wary of mistakes didn't speak with me until he felt comfortable enough. Akram warned me that Bashar was the Man at crackgammon. Apparently he is acknowledged as the best player in Damascus. I was privileged, Akram told me, to have such a skilled opponent. Boy did he whup me good.

While handing me my ass, Bashar asked me about my wife, my family, the usual questions. He was surprised to hear that at 26 I had no children. He had five children. He was bald and was excelling at the Einstein look, bald pate gleaming in the sun, dark, unruly tangles of hair rising to either side of the dome.

After CL had arrived and gotten himself some food, the light was beginning to dim to the extent that I could no longer see the dice. I thanked my gracious hosts for the hospitality and the lessons and repaired with CL and Nick to the Shahbandar Palace Hotel. As we left, Akram and Bashar called after me.
"See you tomorrow!"
"Don't forget what you learned!"

At the Shahbandar, everyone already seemed to know who I was. The manager came out to say hello and showed me to where Ammar was at work behind the reception desk, which, oddly for a Reception, was at the rear of the hotel behind a subtle wooden partition. I guess for $120 dollars a night for a single room, nobody wants to see the guy taking their money. If it was my money, they'd need to put the receptionist behind bulletproof glass.

Ammar gave me the key to his apartment. Nick and CL were waiting outside. We let ourselves in to the house and a fierce little lady in a house dress was upon us in seconds.
"Who are you?" she demanded.
"We're friends of Ammar's," I said.
"How long you stay?"
"One more night," I answered.
She compressed her lips in the puckered manner of unhappy middle-aged women and chin-lifted at me.
"I don't like it," she said.
Ammar later explained to me that when he had friends come in the past, they had emailed and asked him to sort out accommodation. He had always arranged for them to rent the rooms the landlady kept downstairs for short-term guests. Since we weren't renting the short-term rooms, she was theoretically losing money. This made her unhappy. That is why she didn't like it.

CL dumped his bags and the three of us went out for a walk. The following day we were planning on going to a village in the Golan Heights that had been bombed by the Israelis and had a museum in it. Then we were going to go to Palmyra, the famous site of ancient ruins that provides one of Syria's strongest tourist draws. To visit the village in the Golan Heights we had to get special permission from the Ministry of the Interior. CL and I arranged with Nick for him to meet us the next day and Nick went back to his hotel, a cheap fleapit he had found for 200 Syrian pounds a night (under 4 euros).

CL and I strolled through the Old City, enjoying the atmosphere and the balmy weather. We were back at the apartment for midnight as arranged and Ammar got there two hours later. I tossed the key down to him from the apartment window. He let himself in and came in, laughing. I asked him what was up. He showed me the head of the key. He had snapped off the shaft of the key in the lock as he turned it. CL was properly introduced to him and Syaman and the three of them chatted for a while. CL was tired and I needed to internet wuite badly, so Syaman, Ammar and I went to the cafe round the corner. Ammar insisted on paying for my time. Syaman rolled over on his wheelie office chair every few minutes to dump a mound of pistachios on my desk. He would pour out a stack of them, look at me for a minute, smile his big chubby smile, dump out some more and then wheel himself away.

After I had finished with the various things the net has to offer that we somehow convince ourselves are so important, Ammar told me to come say hello to his girlfriend. Ammar's girlfriend was a Chinese girl who lives in Libya and works as an Arabic-English translator. When Ammar goes to Dubai, they are hoping she can get a job out there as a translator so they can be together. Living in Libya, she had given herself the Arabic name Kowther. We traded pleasantries over the internet headset in that way you do when talking to someone you've never met through a medium that denies you face-to-face communication. She was very sweet and talked glowingly of Ammar, an appraisal I agreed with wholeheartedly. Like every computer terminal I saw in a net cafe in Syria, there was a working headset for IM chatting. This appeared to be the basic form of communication. In Lebanon, Turkey and Syria, I met people, mostly guys, who had friends or girlfriends online and only ever saw or spoke to them through IM. Ammar was no exception, maintaining a relationship with a girl he had never been in the same room with only through the internet. I couldn't help but marvel at the fact that in Syria I couldn't access my own blog or Facebook, but Ammar was allowed to say whatever he wanted and see whatever he wanted through the IM video chat function. No wonder it was so popular. That kind of selective censorship really blew my mind.

We finished up at the cafe and went back to the flat. CL was on the air mattress, snoring happily. I crawled guiltily into my pilfered bed and fell into a deep sleep punctuated only by the sounds of cars blaring at each other in crowded alleys and the distant, imagined clacking of dice on a huge, dark, lacquered backgammon board.

Day 20: Lattakia/Damascus - $120 to $0 in 60 seconds

I don't know what was worse when I woke up, the headache or the smell.  I was sprawled on one of the beds in the salubrious Safwan Hotel.  I had a vague memory of getting back to the hotel.  Then I realised that Sami had arranged to take us to his farm today for an all-day picnic.  Sami is a warm, hospitable guy, but he doesn't half turn the screws when he wants company.

Staggering down to the reception, I bumped into Grace.  Sam was still in bed, moaning off the scotch little by little.  They were not going to Sami's farm.  I also had an excuse - today was the day I was going to Damascus, the jewel in the crown of my trip.  I had to get there and unless Sami could get me back to the hotel or bus station by 17:00, no sale.

13:00 rolls around and as arranged, Sami pulls up, honks, gets out, comes in and sits down.
"Let's go," he said.
"Yeah," I replied.  "About that..."
Grace begged off because Sam was still in bed, performing a full Camille.  I explained that unless he promised to have me back by 17:00, I'd turn into a pumpkin.  Sami cajoled, requested, demanded, insisted, suggested and generally pulled as many strings as he could but in the end he told me that if we went to his farm I wouldn't be back until at least 22:00.  Ergo, no farm for me.  Sami and I exchanged numbers and he fish-eyed me and Grace closely before leaving without us.  I got the impression that he was disappointed.

Grace and I went to arouse Sam from his stupour only to find him in fine fettle, ready to take on the world as long as the world did not include Sami's farm.  The three of us slunk into the centre of Lattakia, studiously avoiding Sami's haunts, and surreptitiously enjoyed a wholesome Syrian breakfast of shwarma and garlic sauce.  As we ate, who should arrive out of nowhere but Captain Libya, fresh off the bus from Lebanon!  He and his new companion, a Syrian student named Lauron, ate and then we all repaired to a Corniche tea house to play some crackgammon and drink chai khameer, the same as normal tea but served with way more sugar and without the tea bag.

I again lost track of time while playing and realised that I would be hard pressed to catch the 17:00 bus to Damascus, which takes four hours.  I hurried back to the Safwan, paid Mohammed, said goodbye to the crazy uncle and the degenerate dwarf pervert and was kindly escorted by CL and Lauron to the bus station, where I got my ticket and was firmly ensconced on the 18:00 bus.  CL assured me that when I got to Damascus, all I had to do was go to the Methat Pasha main drag and stumble into one of the numerous budget hotels he said awaited me there.

The bus ride to Damascus passed without incident, apart from the presence of the first and only Arab body-builders I have ever seen, two of them, necks like engine blocks, wider than their seats, smoking cigarettes that looked like matchsticks in their sausage-fingered hands.  Ridiculous.

I arrived at the Damascus bus station and, luckily forewarned by my trusty Lonely Planet, managed to get a taxi to the Old City for the correct price (50-ish Syrian) as opposed to the taxi scumbag price (200 Syrian).  All it took was one honest cabbie who happily put on the meter without me having to ask and even insisted that I drink his cup of tea that jiggled tantalisingly in the cup holder.  As we approached the Old City, the streets became more and more narrow, the buildings more and more decrepit, until eventually we were stuck in a traffic jam caused by a road built for horses that had been double- and triple-parked upon until only single file traffic was possible and even then exceedingly difficult.  I paid my cabbie, strapped on my gear and headed for Methat Pasha, the main street of the Old City, by day crowded with hawkers and shopkeepers, by night deserted and unlit, eerie in the absence of all noise.  I asked a guy wearing a death's head t-shirt for directions.  He walked me there.  After a few paces, I noticed that he was staring at my hair and beard.  He caught my eye.
"Metal?" he asked.
I was momentarily baffled.  By way of explanation, he threw up the horns.  Awesome.  He told me there was metal to be found in Damascus.  I looked but never found.  His name was, of course, Mohammed.  He gave me his number and left me at the start of Pasha street.  It was enormous, a huge vaulted ceiling covering what by day is one of the oldest and busiest bazaars in the world.  I walked along, seeing no lights and, more importantly, no budget hotels.  I came to the end of the street, which degenerated from stately shops and covered roof to piles of rubble in the middle of the road and old houses leaning against each other and groaning like drunks.  I asked a group of three guys if they knew where I could find a cheap hotel.  In true Syrian style, they insisted on accompanying me for the next forty minutes, tramping around the Old City, looking for a place to stay.  One of them was tall, thin and quiet.  The talkative one was a sound recordist for Syrian television.  The third was dressed all in denim with a centre parting to his hair and a dangerously rakish moustache.  He looked like an Arabic Douglas Fairbanks.

They walked with me for ages until we found the ominously named Shahbandar Palace Hotel.  I seriously doubted if a hotel with the word "palace" in the name would be in my price range.  We rang the buzzer.  A slim, nattily dressed guy of about my age answered the door.  He spoke excellent English.  This place was going to be expensive.  I asked how much for the cheapest room.
"120 dollars," he answered.
Shit.
"Is there anywhere cheaper?"
He held up a finger, took out his mobile, made a call, chatted in Arabic for a few moments and then hung up.
"Is 30 dollars alright?"
"That's still way too much," I said apologetically, feeling like an abject hobo surrounded by all these helpful guys.
The guy, whose name was Ammar (his nickname was Mac), made another phone call.  He talked, listened, talked again and hung up.
"Okay," he said.  "You can stay with me."
"What?"
He spoke to the three guys accompanying me in Arabic.  Then he turned back to me.
"They will take you to the internet cafe where my roommate is.  He will let you in.  I'm sorry but he doesn't speak English.  Is that okay?"
I was dumbfounded.  I knew the Syrians were nice but this was the absolute limit.
"Are you sure?" I asked, still expecting some sort of joke.
"I'll see you at midnight," Ammar said.  "Now go take a shower and relax."

The three guys walked me to the internet cafe to meet Syaman, Ammar's roommate, a Syrian Kurd.  As they walked, the Arabic Douglas Fairbanks turned to me and said something that, in the moody lighting from the sparse streetlamps, with the sounds of the Old City murmuring around us, the smells of the warm, humid Middle Eastern night, really caught me off guard and seemed to be more meaningful than I'm sure it was intended to be.  He looked me square in the eyes.
"Your mother really loves you," he said.
I froze for a moment and then kept moving.  I'm sure it's just a phrase he translated in his head from the Arabic, something they say whenever someone has a stroke of luck, but in context it felt like much more than that.  I smiled at him and nodded.
"I'm sure she does," I answered.

We met Syaman at the internet cafe, my three friends said goodbye and Syaman and I walked the five minutes or so to their apartment.  Ammar's apartment was one room rented in a shared house.  The family that owns the house lives on the ground floor.  On the second floor are four bedrooms all rented to expatriates, apart from Ammar.  Ammar's room was about eight feet by twelve feet and in it were two single beds.  His regular flatmate, a German archaeologist, was away on a dig.  Syaman was crashing there for the fifteen or so weeks that the German was away.  Syaman was a dark, broad guy with a ready, easy smile and the snazzy dress sense I had come to expect from the Syrians.  They are a people that are always dressed formally.  Even if they live in a dirt-floored shack, they have at least two sets of formal clothes that they wear out of doors.  Syaman taught me to count from 1 to 6 in Kurdish and also taught me the word for "good", which is bash.  Zar bash means very good.  We communicated in a haphazard manner for about half an hour and then I took a shower.  The facilities are shared between the rooms - a common kitchen and a shower room with a Western toilet.  The roof of the house is an open terrace with the rooms built in a bungalow style around the square rooftop.

After my shower, I returned to the room to find Ammar back from work.  He asked how I was settling in.  I thanked him profusely and he interrupted me.
"It makes me angry when you say thank you," he said.  "Stop it."
I told him I just didn't know how else to express gratitude.  Ammar shrugged.
"This is how we do things here.  Maybe one day if I am in London I can stay with you in your home."
I told him it would be my pleasure.  He grinned and asked if I was hungry.  Before I could protest, Syaman ran off and returned ten minutes later with a pizza, three shwarmas and a bag of soft drinks.  They asked if I wanted a beer.  I declined.  We ate our shwarma and shared the pizza.  Ammar asked me about London and what I thought about Syria.  He told me about his job and his life.  He was from Qamishli, the border town with Turkey.  He worked as the night receptionist at the Shahbandar and he had just earlier that day secured himself a two year contract in Dubai at the Palms resort as the reservations manager.  At the Shahbandar, a hotel that charges $120 a night for a single room, Ammar made $400 a month.  This was very good for Syria, he told me.  At the Palms, he would make $1500 a month with accommodation included as a perk of the job.  He was very excited about the trip.  With his half of the rent being $100 a month, he was currently living on $300 a month, a princely sum for the average Syrian.  While I stayed with him, he refused to allow me to pay for anything, even if I tried to sneak.  When we went to the internet cafe, he paid.  Both Syaman and Ammar, like all Syrians, were smokers, but when they found out I didn't smoke they both smoked outside without a word.  I told Ammar that he could smoke inside - after all, it was his place.  He told me that if I didn't smoke it would be rude to smoke around me indoors.  Syaman agreed and they both took turns smoking on the terrace for the whole time I stayed there.  They didn't even smoke in the room when I was out, just so that the room wouldn't smell.  When I told Ammar that I have very good friends in London who smoke around me even though they know that I don't and that it aggravates my asthma, he was shocked.
"Why would they do that?" he asked, seriously at a loss.  "That's a horrible thing to do to a friend!"
The level of hospitality I enjoyed with Ammar and Syaman was overwhelming.

I got a text from CL asking me where I was staying so he could meet me there the next day.  Ammar asked about the text, I explained and Ammar insisted that CL come stay with us at his place.  I started setting up my sleeping bag and he asked me what I was doing.  I told him I had an air mattress and would be fine on the floor.  He asked why I wanted to sleep on the floor.  I pointed out that there were two beds and three of us.  He told me he and Syaman would share one bed and I would have the other one.  I said that that was ridiculous - I couldn't take a bed to myself if my hosts were sharing.  He told me that I could sleep on the floor if I wanted but the bed would remain empty on principle even if I didn't take it.

We chatted about life and travel for another hour or so and then I started to doze off.  I apologised but Ammar told me to go to sleep and he and Syaman would go to the internet cafe so as not to keep me awake with their talking.  My protests were weakened by the fact that I was already basically asleep.  After much moral debate, I slept in the bed.  And I slept very well.

Day 19: Lattakia - Be our guest, be our guest

So I didn't go to Damascus today as I planned. Instead I ended up teaching Sam and Grace, two young travellers from Britain via the Netherlands, how to play crackgammon. Then the monkey was on my back and we sat in the local tea house playing all afternoon.

In the morning, before heading out, Mohammed's crazy uncle had a visit from his dentist. Not just any dentist. This guy was a gypsy dentist who carried his surgery gear around in a black leather satchel. He was re-cementing Mohammed's uncle's front teeth, which are fakes. This is what a Syrian gypsy dentist and his patient look like, by the way.

Lattakia worked its magic on me slowly. The sea air, the laidback atmosphere, the cheerful people, all of these things worm their way into one's affections until plans for onward travel take on a distasteful, unpleasant quality. Why would I want to sit on a bus for hours and then fight through the streets of Damascus looking for a place to sleep? I'm sitting in the sun, the sea breeze is cooling my heels and I have unlimited games of crackgammon stretching ahead of me like the soothing dunes of the Sahara. I had been sucked into the Black Hole of Lattakia and I was Ernest Borgnine.

As we sat at the cafe, playing away, a man wearing glasses and sporting quite pronounced but not altogether unpleasant teeth strode purposefully up to the table, looked us over cursorily and announced "My name is Sami. You will all be my guests for dinner tonight." That was how he introduced himself. Sami went on to explain that he was a local farmer and would be honoured if we would join him, his wife and his wife's mother for an evening of traditional Syrian food and music at the local swanky hotel, Al-Cazino. Of course we accepted. Over the course of the evening, however, it became increasingly clear to me that if Sami was a farmer, I was Jesus.

Sam and Grace moved to another table to play each other and Sami joined me at the board. He ordered tea for us both and then proceeded to hand me my ass in a merciless fashion. I learned a great deal from playing him. He called his wife several times and eventually she arrived, driving his car. She was wearing make-up, tight jeans and a leopard print top. Their Filipino maid was sitting in the front with them. Sam, Grace and I piled into the back.

At their apartment, Sam, Grace and I were offered fruit, candy and nuts while Sami and his wife bustled about getting ready. Their Filipino maid fetched drinks and, when Sami and his wife were not in the room, happily answered questions about how she ended up in Syria. She told us that lots of Filipinos work in the Arab world as domestics. Her agency in the Phillippines sent her to Lebanon, which she hated, and then offered her the choice of going back to Lebanon or to Syria. She chose Syria. I asked her if she liked it. She waited pointedly until Sami's wife left the room and then said that it was better than Lebanon, but with a look on her face that said she would much rather be somewhere else entirely.

Sami and his wife were a very progressive couple. They eschewed traditional dress and formality in favour of very Western habits. Sami happily talked to us while wearing his towel straight out of the shower. He and his wife had a playfulness that I had never seen in an Arab country before. His wife showed us stacks of photo albums, including their wedding pictures, in which she is sporting quite the quiff and wearing what would be classed as a racy number even by Western standards.

Sami's mother-in-law arrived with her Filipino maid. Apparently they are all the rage in Lattaki right now. Mother-in-law was a really tough audience. She spoke no English and glared at me in that tight-lipped manner that older women have that gives you the impression that they've seen through you in some way even if they haven't. For a while I was sure she had smelled Jew on me, but I was thrown a lifeline that I pounced on to great effect. Sami was watching the news and the Future party was mentioned. I asked him who he supported in Lebanon. He said that he was for Hezbollah, 100%. He also said that I would be hard pressed to find anyone in Syria who didn't take Hezbollah's side. He said that many, including himself, had written Hariri off as a Western puppet. I immediately whipped out my camera and showed him the pictures of me in Baalbek, at the gift shop, in the mosque. I told him about my meeting with Abou Yasser and Fatah al-Intifada. He translated for his mother-in-law. She broke into a veritable sunstorm of smiles. Problem solved. I was in. I was one of the family.

We headed for the restaurant, which was situated in the lobby of the Al-Cazino hotel. When we arrived, the room was empty. It was Thursday night, which is Friday night in the Muslim World. We were brought hummus, baba ganoush and salads which were excellent. The meal progressed at a very lackadaisical pace. Sami had insisted that we would drink with him, so while he put away glass after glass of arak, Sam and I had been given a litre of Grant's scotch to deal with.

As we grazed on the excellent meze, Sami told us a little more about himself. He was from the same village as Bashar Assad, the Syrian President, and was also from the same family. They had cousins in common. The way you can tell the members of the Assad family is from their eyes. Only the members of Assad's family from that particular village have blue eyes. All other Syrians have brown eyes. Sami told us that Bashar is a great practical joker and loves a laugh. From the millions of portraits of him glaring down from every available surface in Syria, you'd never have guessed. Sami wanted me to stay in Lattakia and hang out. He told me to forget Damascus. He told me to call my wife and have her fly out. He told me I shouldn't go home. For some reason, I couldn't help but pick up on an undertone of power in his entreaties. This guy wasn't a farmer. When I asked around about him later, people simply shrugged and said that nobody knows what he did, but most likely the secret police. All I know is that he was a flawlessly generous host, an excellent dancer and a very funny guy when drunk, something he claimed he only did one night a week.

Meat arrived on great sizzling platters. Bread, salad and hummus was refilled. We ate until we were fit to burst. The band kicked up a notch and soon the dance floor was filled with young Syrians in trendy clothes, snapping their fingers and strutting their stuff. Sami and his wife cut a rug real nice as well. Grace and I even managed to get Sam in all his Englishness to take to the dance floor and convulse enthusiastically in a close approximation of being in time.

At the end of the evening, the band left, the lights came up and the revellers simply took the instruments from the stage and began playing by themselves, singing and dancing around their tables. I got behind the drum kit and jammed along to a few Syrian folk numbers. When I got up to leave, I noticed that I had been dancing so vigorously in my flip-flops that I had cut my foot in several places and was bleeding quite badly.

Sami dropped Sam, Grace and I back at the hotel and bid us good night. I collapsed into bed, a third of a litre of scotch the worse for wear and dreading the hangover to come.