The road to Damascus

Sorry folks- it has been a long time since we last blogged. For those of you not in the know, we have just been in Syria for a month (where blogspot was mysteriously unavailable...) and we are now in back in Turkey in Sanliurfa.

Syria is not exactly en route to China, but a Syrian kebab shop owner who we met in Austria persuaded us to go to escape the Turkish winter.... why not we thought...? It turns out that Syria is an amazing country for cycle touring and hopefully the next couple of posts will help you understand why...

We got the bus to Gaziantep from Ankara and then cycled across the border into Syria from there...

We arrive at the border at the same time as the bus from Tehran, a group of helpful passangers usher us to the front of various queues and the bus driver offers us a lift into town, which we decline.

Half an hour into Syria and we are stopped by some builders and forced to drink tea (the hardship!).
We cycle on, tens of people wave at us and say hello. A lot of women are wearing the chador, many men are dressed in the red and white checkered headscarf. It already looks very different from Turkey. We stop for lunch by the side of the road. A lorry passes us, stops and reverses up the hard shoulder. A man gets out, opens the back, walks over to us and hands us some cans of drink and walks away again as we shout 'thank you' after him.... We have been in Syria for about two hours. People seem pretty nice.

We can't believe we are on the way to Damascus!!

Aleppo is first though..

The souk:

The citadel:

Mosque:


Lawrence of Arabia's bar bill in The Baron Hotel:

The Armenian Church (around 7% of Syria's population is Christian)

In the souk we meet a student called Mohaned who speaks amazing English and is going to Saudi Arabia to be a translator. He invites us back to his villiage to meet his family. We accept. As soon as we arrive food is brought out by his sisters and mother. We eat, his sisters don't. We leave to go to Mohaned's uncle's house, the sisters fuss over Helen and give her a necklace as a present.

At the uncle's house we sit with three generations of men of the village and drink tea and tiny shots of Arabic coffee brought round by the youngest boys. Helen is treated as an honorary man (this is very much a men-only event). We get asked a lot of questions about politics and religion and western culture (Mohaned translates). Mohaned's uncle, who appears to be head of the tribe, personally serves us tea and brings us more cushions to sit on. The men ask how much wives cost in Britain and fall about with laughter when Ed tells them that they are free! Most of the men in the room have two or three wives and many children. We sit talking long into the night. Ed, being a guest, is made to smoke nargile for hours on end - a hard task for a non-smoker! One of Mohaned's uncles personally accompanies us back from the villiage to the hotel. He is on the way to see his other wife in town and absolutely won't let us pay for our taxi. We go to sleep with our heads buzzing....

We have got back far too late to set off the next day, but we set off the following day.

This part of Syria is surprisingly green!

We cycle around 30 km and get stopped for tea by a group of men. A women comes out of the house and drags Helen in after her to a huge gaggle of women and children. A women called Manur speaks English. A plump lady prods Helen and tells her she needs to be fatter and that all this cycling is no good. Lunch is brought out and we are force fed!! We are begged to stay the night, but we feel we should keep going and say goodbye. Manur presses a package into Helen's hands, she is not allowed to open it then, but later discovers it is a dress!!

Manur's husband and children. Missing from the photo is Manur and her youngest baby. Most women in Syria refuse to have their photograph taken, or their male relatives refuse for them. Four or fıve people on a motorbike is quite normal here.

We cycle on into Idlib where a number of people help us find a cheap hotel.

We cycle through the 'dead cities' of Al Bara and Sergillia the next day. In the morning we stop at a shop to buy some food. The owner brings us two bowls of something like porridge and some tea. Helen is dragged into the house by more women and fed more food to fatten her up. We drag ourselves away. The shop keeper refuses to let us pay for our shopping. All protest fails. We cycle on and are havıng to refuse umpteen cups of tea to keep goıng. We hide in the ruins of Al Bara in order to eat lunch in case someone is nice to us...!

Al Bara:

Sergilla:

We cycle on. We have to stop to ask directions umpteen times as our map is rubbish. Lots of tea invitations to refuse. Some boys on motor cycles accompany us for about half an hour to make sure we don't get lost.

We camp at the ruins of Afamia (not bad):

More tea the next day:

We cycle on, some tiny children race across a field to meet us shouting. We have to stop. 100 meters up the road we are offered tea by people in what looks like a refugee camp.

Eventually we make it to Hama with its 'Nori' water wheels:

We sit in the park eating delicious roasted chicken and chips. A group of young men come and talk to us, later their teacher joins us. We beg them to let us treat them to chai and baklava, but they refuse. Before we say goodbye one of them disappears for a minute and then presents us with two sweatbands with the Syrian flag on them that he has brought from a souvenir stall.

The next day we are mobbed by slightly too enthusiastic children as we pass a school. 'Hullo', 'what is your name?', 'where are you from', 'my name is...' phrases we would hear all day for the next month.
Helen trying to stand up:

We get lost and have to ask for directions may times, we refuse lots of tea. A shop owner points us up the road and then motorbikes after us about 15 minutes later to check we have gone the right way. Some more teenaged boys on motorbikes accompany us for about an hour, explaining to bemused villagers where we are going as we struggle up some horrific gradients.

We hide in a grove of trees to camp!!!

The amazing crusader castle of Crac de Chevaliers the next day:

We cycle on to Homs on a minor road. A man shouts at us to stop, we wave politely and carry on. we don't want more tea... 'STOP' he shouts. Then we see the man with the machine gun. We stop. 'Passport' he demands. OPPS we think. 'You can't cycle on this road' he says, 'you must go on the highway'. 'OK, SORRY' we reply. 'No problem, welcome to Syria' he says. Lebanon is VERY close (we may even have been there!). Wish we had a better map.

We get to Homs. Some students called M and A stop us. 'We will help you find a hotel' they say, they accompany us for an hour. We agree to meet later so that we can take them out for dinner. We fail and they take us out for dinner. We are invited back to their flat to drink tea and mate (a South American tea-like drink whıch is very popular in this part of Syria for some reason) and beer.

The following day two punctures and a tea break later we have made it about 10 km out of town by 11 in the morning...

Some bedouin shepherd boys stop to invite us for tea that they are cooking on a small fire. We can't refuse. We sit in the desert speaking using mime.

We cycle on, we have to stop as we have no water and little food because we have been too scared to buy anything in case people won't let us pay!!! It's all going well, we manage to buy some groceries from a shopkeeper, but we don't escape an invitation into his house for tea. Helen is dragged into the women's living room. We refuse dinner and we refuse a bed for the night.... it is too early...

It is getting dark and we are still about 20km away from the monastery we wanted to stay at. We push on through a town and decide to camp in the desert at the edge of a town. It is dark. We think it should be OK. We gather a pile of rocks to fend off the wild dogs we have been told horror stories about. One hour later, we are cooking dinner and some men come to our tent. 'You can't camp here' they say, 'it is too dangerous, you must come and stay in our house'. We protest in vain. We move all our stuff to the house. A bed is made up in a spare room. Chicken is barbequed especially for us, no one else eats it. Ed stays up late chatting and then eats a second meal with them at midnight.

The next day we finally get to Mar Musa monastery. We stay in the monastery for two nights.

The following day we battle through a sandstorm to ge to Damascus. Exhausted!!!

The famous souk:

Mosque

Fava bean (foul) store:

We sit in the courtyard of the mosque to recover and spot Rob, a friend from St Andrew's University!!!!!!! Small world or big world???? Right now we really can't decide.