I feel a lot better when waking up in Batumi, Georgia, my guts just about holding themselves together. We get ready to check out, gearing up to make the 1200+ overland journey to into Syria. Whilst walking to the bathroom, my guts prolapse. Then they repeat the process five times in quick succession, with increasing violence. I can't even arch my spine forward to zip up my fucking money belt without darting my panicked eyes up at Christina, as she either registers a false alarm or gives her snout a pre-emptive pinch. It seems unlikely we'll make this journey without a very public outrage. On the previous days train journey from Tbilisi, I desecrated the water closet with such unfathomable inhumanity that when Christina tried to use it later on, the guard simply wagged her finger and said, "No! Too dirty!"
For once, I'll spare the details.
I resort to punching both feet through a plastic carrier bag, thus forming some sort of PVC diaper, crossing off two sexual peccadilloes at once.
Giving them a trial potter about the room, I sound like a box of Christmas decorations being brought down from the loft, crinkling, rustling and causing me to sweat profusely. Enraged, I rip them off like some bizarre and infantile Incredible Hulk.
Once we cross the border back into Turkey I borrow one of Christina's sanitary towels, in order to soak up the worst damage in a worst case scenario. I must have been a woman in the last past-life I inhabited, as I end up placing the towel exactly where my non-existent clunge is, and not where my by now decimated ring-piece is.
(We have no photos from Syria. All our photos were lost. Consequently, all accompanying images here are borrowed. If anyone has a problem with me using their photos, contact me and I will be happy to remove...)
Ar Raqqah
The border at Akçakale led us through to customs and into a town which I believe is called Tell Abvad. What followed was one of those rare special moments that you mistakenly believe all travelling will be prior to setting off and before it dawns on you that ‘intrepid world travel’ basically amounts to filthy keyboards, long and tedious phone calls to Natwest, and billboards featuring Frank fucking Lampard.
(We have no photos from Syria. All our photos were lost. Consequently, all accompanying images here are borrowed. If anyone has a problem with me using their photos, contact me and I will be happy to remove...)
Ar Raqqah
The border at Akçakale led us through to customs and into a town which I believe is called Tell Abvad. What followed was one of those rare special moments that you mistakenly believe all travelling will be prior to setting off and before it dawns on you that ‘intrepid world travel’ basically amounts to filthy keyboards, long and tedious phone calls to Natwest, and billboards featuring Frank fucking Lampard.
In Tel Abyad, a tiny dessert road made up of one long strip of shops, tattoo-faced Bedouin women stop to stare. A group of children spot us and run over, escorting us down the road jumping up and down with wide eyes. Men stop working in garages to come out into the street. We have no idea where we were heading. Our introduction to the jaw-dropping hospitality and kindness of the wonderful Syrian people came when a mechanic who looked like he didn't have much of a pot to piss in, insisted on driving us to a bus stop and going on to pay for us to get to Ar Raqqah.
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Once at the bus depot in Raqqah, the police assigned a tattooed 11 year old boy to make sure we got on the bus soundly. Again, we were gawped at by everyone, many coming close up for a decent stare. The police began clobbering some very small kids with a truncheon after they begged us for money. Registering Christina's horror, the cops started telling us that they were just playing and the penniless kids enjoy the 'game', regardless of the tears and terror in their eyes as they fled. We met an old dishevelled bloke who looked just like Karl Lagerfeld. He told us he is an American from New Jersey who was trained at Christian Dior in Paris until he came to Syria. He whispers comments about the Syrian leaders, which sound like gentle grumbling, though he looks around nervously before making them.
A group of headscarved teen girls sit on a bench looking at us giggling. Their tittering morphs into expressions of shock as we walk closer to them. It's been 33 hours since we set off from Batumi and we are beyond shattered. I’m too exhausted to pay any mind to the tickle bothering my thigh. Only the girls’ contorting smiles and south-shifting glances cause me to look down, just in time to see the (pointlessly unsoiled) jam-rag roll down my thigh, exit my shorts, and land close to their feet. They are dumbfounded. The rare sight of a western male and he happens to have a monthly menstruation. I stare at the floor, mouthing "Oh God, Oh God...", for the eternal forty five minutes it takes for the bus to arrive.
Aleppo
In Aleppo we are not allowed to use the internet without temporarily handing over our passports first. It's one thing banning Facebook, but do they fear that we have a USB teleportation device that will enable us to leave the stinking internet café and the country with secrets of national security? In the internet place, I'm joined by a young Syrian entrepreneur. He attempts to enlist my help in locating slaughter houses in Britain and Ireland in order for him to procure “…animal waste products for the manufacture of Syrian foods.” One can only fucking imagine. His descriptions lead to my gut-malady suddenly worsening. Fed-up with having spent our only full day in a dingy, smoke-filled hovel, sorting out boring shit we’d rather ignore, we try to make the most of the remains of it. We head to the souq, a huge labyrinth of stalls and shops. As it's a Friday, the holy day in Islam, almost all of them are closed and walking around is both eerie and fascinating. At one stall that is open, two Arabs manage to flog me a Bedouin headscarf, using such a succinct and well-rehearsed technique of hoodwinkery, that I walk away drunk with both awe and bewilderment. We exit the souq with the huge citadel in front of us.
Aleppo
In Aleppo we are not allowed to use the internet without temporarily handing over our passports first. It's one thing banning Facebook, but do they fear that we have a USB teleportation device that will enable us to leave the stinking internet café and the country with secrets of national security? In the internet place, I'm joined by a young Syrian entrepreneur. He attempts to enlist my help in locating slaughter houses in Britain and Ireland in order for him to procure “…animal waste products for the manufacture of Syrian foods.” One can only fucking imagine. His descriptions lead to my gut-malady suddenly worsening. Fed-up with having spent our only full day in a dingy, smoke-filled hovel, sorting out boring shit we’d rather ignore, we try to make the most of the remains of it. We head to the souq, a huge labyrinth of stalls and shops. As it's a Friday, the holy day in Islam, almost all of them are closed and walking around is both eerie and fascinating. At one stall that is open, two Arabs manage to flog me a Bedouin headscarf, using such a succinct and well-rehearsed technique of hoodwinkery, that I walk away drunk with both awe and bewilderment. We exit the souq with the huge citadel in front of us.
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| Citadel at Aleppo © Guillermo Guerini |
Christina goes for a body scrub at a famed hamam. She enters through the saloon doors and is immediately confronted by a room full of naked Muslim women. Assuming that there would be an initial reception desk, followed by changing room before the nudity started, I follow her in before she spins around and stops me in my tracks. It could so easily have been me that entered first. As she gets pampered, I walk around the streets cursing my bad luck. She later tells me that the body scrubber sat eating bread in-between scrubbing her down and intermittently picking dead skin off of her own feet.
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| Library picture: What I believed I would have seen in the female hamam |
The next day, we visit the Souq again, now operational and a different world. Syrian people are the friendliest I have ever met. We are constantly stopped and asked where we were from. The typical response being, “You are welcome in Syria!” bellowed from a huge smiling mouth. On the way to the souq, we pass a long queue outside a bread stall. One elderly gent is served his loaf, turns away from the counter, clocks us and immediately shoves his new loaf at us, imploring us to take it. At times the open-armed welcome became a trial. Just after the bread bloke, one chap stopped us, made us welcome in Syria, and implored us to come to his house for tea. Not waiting to get stuck for too long, we chug the brew standing outside his house, whilst he unfurls map after map, pointing obscure places we should visit, while I grit my teeth like a right twat.
Dead Cities/Apamea
From Hamma, a driver by the name of Faisel took us around the dead cities and the Roman ruins of Apamea. Apamea features the original Roman paving slabs which still have the imprints of the chariot wheels.
Our solitude is obliterated by a huge double-coach party of pensioners. Luckily, they have a guide who is leading them down the street at a snail’s pace as his lecture bores them to death and the sun incinerates them. We move quickly ahead.
Faisel then drops us at some ancient citadel or other and waits for us for in the furnace of his taxi. Bored before we’d even having paid and entered, instead of just heading straight back to the car and putting our driver out of his misery by telling him we are not interested, and ashamed of being seen as the philistines we are, we hide in an alcove throwing small pebbles at each other for twenty minutes before heading back.
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Dead City of Sarjilla - © http://iguide.travel/Dead_Cities
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Apamea - courtesy Taras Kalapun - CC-BY http://www.flickr.com/people/xslim/
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Krak des Chevaliers
Faisel also nips us over to Krak des Chavaliers, considered to be one of the finest and most well preserved fortified castles in the world. It’s right top an’all | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| http://members.virtualtourist.com/m/p/m/1381ba/ © Jak BB |
Faisel finally drops us of at Homs to get a coach to Palmyra. When you enter a bus station in Syria, loads of touts mob you, fighting for your custom. One such tout in Homs is a kid of about 12, but well over five and a half foot tall. His pants pulled right up to his chest, his face is stuck in an expression of permanent surprise. He has the closest thing to a real-life cartoon face I’ve ever seen. He looks like Alice the Goon’s son. He also has a perfectly round, squash ball-sized shiny lump sat under his left eye. Regardless of all this, there is something ‘cute’ about him. I shudder every time we lock eyes. When we get our tickets, I turn to Christina and say,
“That boy was...” and she cut me off immediately with,
“Yeah Ben, I know...”
My mum cut me off in exactly the same fashion in Blackpool about 23 years ago, when I first clasped eyes on a kid with Down’s syndrome and wanted answers. It was as if us seeing such a sight was some haunting, inexplicable happening that could never be spoken of again.
Alice the Goons kid, that is… Not the kid with Down’s at Blackpool Pleasure Beach.
Palmyra
We were fairly warned about Palmyra and how the locals deviate wildly from the customary kindness and hospitality one can be accustomed to in Syria. Palmyra really is a wretched fucking place. Once checked into a hotel, I venture out to get the sparse, grey fluff that grows about 200 miles away from my eyebrows shaved off. I leave Christina chatting to the kindly Bedouin hotel manager on the porch. Leaving them together sends a disconcerted wave through me, though I brush it off. When I return, she has locked herself in the room and is really freaked. It soon prevails that as soon as my back was turned the crafty fucker had suggested that they go to our room where he could help her relax with a ‘special Bedouin acupressure massage’, the most vowel-littered pretext to what would probably resulted in a rape/cheeky knee-trembler. Although I am fuming, she quickly makes me see that going down and slapping chops with some twat out in a Middle Eastern desert, isn’t going to result in me swaggering into the local saloon and having a whiskey chaser sent over to me by the townsfolk. We just move hotel.
A nasty, threatening vibe pervades throughout Palmyra. The kids fight with a ferocity rarely seen outside of a northern branch of Wetherspoons. Sat sipping tea on the main drag one balmy evening, two kids aged about nine, batter the dying fuck out of each other. A rock is found and is aimed at another face. One eventually proves himself the hardest by holding his subject tight around the throat with one hand, whilst taking off his leather belt with the other. When I enquire with a waiter if someone should perhaps intervene, he tells me,
“Oh don’t worry. They are brothers. This is Palmyra Street Academy…”
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| Palmyra © Manfred Schweda courtesy of http://www.thisfabtrek.com/journey/asia/syria/20091119-palmyra.php |
The next morning, I insist we rise at 5am in order to walk up to the citadel to watch the sunrise over the ancient city. Christina is beastly from the moment the alarm goes off, bitching and sniping all the way there. Her misgivings are proved when we get up to the top of the hill. The view is shite and the sunrise about as spectacular as one you would expect in Hull on any day of the year. She’s fuming that I got her out of her kip.
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Palmyra with citadel in background © Aleksandra Borzecka http://www.trekearth.com/gallery/photo225010.htm
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Vs
All the talk of food leads us to some hovel for breakfast. When Christina goes to the toilet, an English couple sat at the table next us seem to be having a similar morning and the exact same relationship gripes:
HIM: (consulting a map) “I think first we should go and see the roman theatre…”
HER: “Well it won’t be a theatre will it… just some old rocks and pillars lay about…”
HIM: Well, try not to be so rude. There’s a lot to see here and it’s all interesting.
(Long tense pause, whilst staring at him enraged)
HER: Oh Shut up… And stop shoving food into your face!
I hide behind my menu, convulsing, until Christina comes back and picks up where the other girl left off.
Speaking of dictatorships, well-read non-Syrians seem to speak fairly kindly of the Syrian President, noting he’s trying hard regardless of the mongering his old fella got up to and his 99.9% share of every election. He got on my fucking nerves though, his dial plastered all over the place.
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| http://www.flickr.com/photos/83093440@N00/266402966 |
In this poster he’s got a wee smile on the go, though usually it’s a firm stare, giving the impression he’s watching everyone. One poster outside Palmyra even had his eyes enlarged behind the head, taking up the rest of the billboard. Sound as he’s said to be, what sort of a twat likes the idea of countless pictures of themselves all over the place? Can he not just join Facebook like every other vain fucker..?
Damascus
‘As he neared Damascus on his journey, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice say to him, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?"
My own ‘Road to Damascus’ moment involves persecution from nothing with such biblical magnitude, just the Arctic air-conditioner and a deafening film playing on the TV. As I ignore the temperature plummeting, I cannot prevent the shocking aural violence interrupting Emmylou Harris’s dulcet tones. I look up at the TV just once and witness a scene where an elderly man stops the flailing fists of a young fat girl by catching her by both wrists and slamming his nut right into her face.
I’ve been separated from Christina in what feels like a deliberate move by the coach driver and his lackey to have her at the front near them. After the other nights events I nervously crane my neck into the aisle at precise 30 second intervals for the duration of the journey.
We visit the beautiful Umayad Mosque. Sitting in the huge courtyard, a local family comes over and sits with us and just staring, smiling, and taking countless photos of their kids sat with us. In terms of personal information, they just want to know where we are from and if we’re married, which of course in the Middle East, is always ‘yes’. When inside the mosque, close to the casket that is said to hold the chopped-off napper of Saint. John the Baptist, an old Muslim chap stares at me smiling, seemingly moved to tears just by witnessing a westerner in his mosque. It’s a great experience and one that the former Bush administration would be keen to keep out of the minds of Americans, Bush’s UN Ambassador John R. Bolton throwing Syria and its people onto his churlish "Beyond the Axis of Evil".
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http://www.damascusroom.com/damascus.html
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The Al-Hamidiyya Souq is huge, shafts of sunlight beaming in from the bullet holes in the roof, made from the machine guns of French fighter planes back in 1925.
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| http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/lXPZ7hwboOlP5SjTTlidcQ |
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© http://sheikyermami.com/2010/11/02/no-sharia-here-look-away-nothing-to-see/
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It takes a good few hours, and doesn’t have the friendlier vibe that Aleppo does, but Damascus is a great, great city and Syria just amazing. Now fuck off away from this blog, you useless twat...
