Further Wanderings

After changing a few Euros into Syrian pounds, we got a (extrodinarily expensive, but given that we had Turkish money left to spend, that didn’t matter) taxi trip to the Syrian border.

As Sarah didn’t have her Syrian visa yet, it took a little while to get through (though not that long, as citizens of countries without official Syrian representation present [e.g. New Zealand] are entitled to get a visa at the border.)  All in all it took about 45 minutes, a lot of questions about our professions (presumably to make sure we weren’t journalists or spies) and several flips through our passports (searching for any evidence of a visit to “Occupied Palestine”) before we were turned loose into the country.  Really not that bad in the grand scheme of things, and a definite vote in favour of using the much less busy Kassab border post instead of the one nearest to the big city of Allepo.

With the formalities behind us, we walked up the road about 50m, turned right and almost immediately hailed a passing minibus headed up to the town of Kassab proper, which was to be our first stop in Syria.

A door knocker in Aleppo, Syria. (this was quite a common design.)

While our first days in Syria have been absolutely wonderful, we’ve actually DONE and SEEN relatively little.  Thus, as usual, we’ll be discussing our time here so far as a series of general subjects:

Kassab.  This little town was a great first taste of Syria.  We’d actually spied it from the Turkish side during our ride to the border and commented on how impressive its setting was.  Kassab sits on a hillside, perhaps 300m above the border crossing, with only a small mountain range separating it from the Mediterranian Sea.  It’s recently become a popular vacation spot for well to do Syrians, and a shepherd we met and spent a lot of time talking with explained that the dozens upon dozens of small condo buildings on the hillside have pretty much all been constructed in the past 3 to 5 years.

 

A view of Kassab from the hillside outside of town.  Note the incredible profusion of new 5-7 story apartment blocks.

While there wasn’t a lot to do there, we occupied our time with walks up to a mountain saddle for one last look at Turkey, across the mountain range (almost) to the sea, and with promenading up and down the main street interacting as best we could with the locals.  The highlight of this last was clearly the couple of games of foosball we were invited to play with two men hanging around the taxi stand.  Though linguistic communication was entirely impossible, there were lots of smiles and laughter.  The games concluded, one of our teammates, against our protestations, bought us a couple of falaffels and urgit cola’s for lunch.

This segues nicely into the section on… Syrian Hospitality.

It’s a good thing we’d been in Turkey before this, because it provided us with a bit of a warmup for what was to come.  The kindness of strangers in Turkey was very noteworthy, but the Syrians have taken it several steps beyond.  While few Syrians know much English or French, they are almost universally familar with the phrase “Welcome to Syria,” and those who aren’t do their best to convey the same message in Arabic, or by other means.

If I went ahead and listed every example of how friendly the Syrian people were to us during our first week here, you’d be reading for hours.  A majority of the shopkeepers we transacted with gave us little gifts (e.g. mini packets of chewing gum, an extra stuffed falaffel, or a super packed ice cream) along with our purchase or refused to accept payment for their goods.  Young men with whom we exchanged a few words on the minibus insisted on paying our fare when we arrived.  Whenever someone spotted us looking at a map he’d approach us and virtually insist on leading us to where we needed to go, or at the very least on offering some advice.  Schoolchildren surrounded us, thickening the air with their choruses of “Hello!  What’s your name? Welcome to Syria” until their teachers came along and made them leave us alone (BOTH of these, of course, providing examples of how hospitable folks are.)  This sort of thing went on and on.  It was more pronounced in the smaller towns and cities, but it happened everywhere, and with such frequency that Sarah and I wondered if we’d be able to continue coping with such generosity for three weeks or more.

Lattakia.  This medium sized port city was our second stop in Syria.  We found a nice, fairly inexpensive, TinTin themed, place to stay by the water (unfortunately the port is smack in between the city and the sea, so all we really got a view of was cranes and containers, but it was nice all the same.)

 

Lattakia.  The Malibu of Syria.  And not just because of the palm trees and seaside location.

Lattakia is an interesting place in that there really isn’t much to do there as a tourist, but it seems like it would be a fabulous place to live.  The people were supremely friendly (as described above) the food was great (as described below) and it just had a very pleasant and open feel to it.  This was characterized by the womens’ dress which, with the exception of theheadscarves on perhaps 30% of them, was pretty much indistinguishable from what you’d see in any European city.  (This didn’t really strike us at the time, as it appeared similarly liberal to, say, Taksim in Istanbul, but in comparison to what we saw later, it was a very pronounced difference.)  Anyhow our time wandering around, whether during Lattakia’s relaxed daytimes or it’s vibrant evenings was just delightful.  By the end of our 36 hours there I found myself contemplating it as a potential retirement spot.  (and no, I’m NOT joking.)

Me at Qalat Salah ad Din (the name translates literally to Saladin’s Castle.  Saladin was the near legendary leader of the Muslim forces who finally succeeded in almost completely removing the crusaders from Syria, Palestine and Egypt.) 

Qalat al Salah ad Din.  This is the one real bit of sightseeing we’ve done in Syria.  About a 45 minute Microbus (the equivalent of the Turkish Dolmus) trip from Lattakia, it is a VERY impressive castle.  There’s been a castle on the site for well over 1000 years, but the majority of what remains was constructed by Robert de Saone, a Frankish crusader during the 12th century.  It was the Frankish construction that made the place as awesome as it was.  The castle sits on top of a ridge between two steep-sided canyons that merge at its south end.  This gives it a pretty impregnable situation, but that wasn’t good enough for the crusaders, who dug about 84000 cubic metres out of the ridge to leave it sitting on its own little plateau (that’s about 200 000 tons of solid rock, all excavated by hand with pretty simple tools.) 

As if the excavation of the “moat” wasn’t impressive enough on its own, the crusader builders left a tall, skinny pillar of rock behind to act as a support for the castle’s drawbridge.

The drive there and the walk back, down a series of very tight switchbacks into a 300m deep ravine, then right back up the other side, was almost as impressive as the castle itself.  Even for someone who wasn’t fascinated with the history of the crusading period (as I am) this place would be well worth a visit.

 

The stables at Qalat Salah ad Din, which I could swear still smelled of horses.

A good chunk of the ruins at Qalat Salah ad Din (there’s actually quite a bit more to the place than this… It’s supposedly one of the largest castles in the world, but much of the big lower section is in very poor shape.)

Aleppo.  The largest city in Syria, it was, at first, a bit of a disappointment after Lattakia.  This soon passed though, and we thoroughly enjoyed our time there. 

The view of the (rather noisy) streets from the balcony of our hotel room in Aleppo. 

The best part of Aleppo was, without a doubt, the souq, or old city market.  It’s a labyrinthine area containing some 10km of narrow city streets, most of them covered by ancient vaulted stone ceilings or more modern corrugated steel ones.  Either way, the place is amazing. 

Meat in the Aleppo Souq.  Just behind the young man on the right hand side there’s a camel’s neck and head hanging from a hook, fur, tongue, eyes and all. 

The souq is divided up into sections, each specializing in a single type of good.  There’s a soap section, a jewelry section, a men’s shoes section, a sweets section, even a section devoted exclusively to women’t headscarves (we bought Sarah one of these, and while we ended up paying lots more than we probably should have, the experience of bargaining with the vendor in the heart of the souq made it worth the price.) 

The hijab (women’s headscarf) section of the Aleppo Souq 

Gold jewelry in the Aleppo Souq

Despite the relative lack of tourists in Syria, there’s even a tourist section, which we had the misfortune to wander into first, very nearly badly miscolouring our opinion of the souq as a whole.  (For all that, it was still kind of fun listening to some of the spiels, most notably the one which included such gems as “Ah!  Canada!  Tabernac (which means welcome) to you!”  and “Come, I’ll show you my junk… I mean stuff!” and “My shop is named Oscar Wilde” and “That’s my friend Aisha…  She’s pretty, but I think her brother is much more attractive.”

The dining room at the Baron hotel.  The Baron is one of the great old hotels of the world, and played host to such guests as Agatha Christie, Charles Lindbergh and T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia.)  Sarah and I went there for a beer and met a (good) crazy French/Indian guy named Maurice who was a regular at the bar.

 

An Aleppine Movie theatre.  Aside from the souq, the coolest part of Aleppo was just wandering around the city exploring.  Each district had its own character, including the Armenian quarter, wherein there was scarcely any Arabic writing to be seen in shop windows.

Hanging with Ahmed.  Ahmed is a very friendly older (63 years) Morrocan fellow that we met in the Lattakia train station.  In the four days following our meeting we spent a good chunk of every day with him.  This was a positive in several ways: 1.  He speaks excellent English, French and Arabic, and could thus help me learn more of this tricky language.  2.  Because of the prevoudly noted language skills, he often translated for us, both in conversation and in reading signs, menus etc.  3.  He’s a very scholarly fellow as well, and taught us lots about Islam, and the history of the region.  4.  He’s just generally pleasant to be around. 

Sarah at the Umayyad Mosque.  Although she already had a headscarf, she still had to rent a cloak.  Which is fine, because who WOULDN’T want to wear a garment like that? 

The desert between Aleppo and Deir ez Zur.  Incredibly, this is a relatively fertile patch of what must be one of the most desert deserts I’ve ever seen.

Deir ez Zur.  It was a 2.5 hour bus ride from Aleppo to this large town waaaay out in the Desert.  Deir sits on the Euphrates river about 80km from the Iraqi border (how adventurous we are!) 

 

The lovely pedestrian suspension bridge over the Euphrates in Deir ez Zur. 

There wasn’t a lot to do in Deir ez Zur, but they get very few tourists, so it made for an interesting experience (in both positive and negative ways.)   The most obvious example of this was our experience with Zahran and his family.  Zahran beckoned us into his shop as we walked into town, sat us down, gave us cold drinks and invited us home to meet his family.  We ended up eating dinner with him, his brother, wife and two children.  We made great friends with his 3 year old son, despite our lack of Arabic (and the fact that he didn’t speak at all in any language.)  He drove us around town in the evening to see the sights.  We met his father.  We even slept at the family home. 

All of this was wonderful, and a great experience, but one that was almost completely ruined by his inability to recognize that Sarah was “married” (we’d explained this upon meeting) and not interested in his “attentions.”  These included leaning towards her and trying to kiss her as he led her upstairs to spend a quiet evening with his wife while I visited the shop again.  Astonishingly, despite a VERY clear indication that she wasn’t interested he continued his bizarre attempts to win her over by blowing her kisses while I was in the bathroom and his wife was around the corner with the kids.  At this point we debated not staying with them, but it was already late, Sarah was convinced that he was oblivious and misguided but not at all dangerous, we didn’t want to embarass his (lovely and absolutely beautiful) wife, and it was possible to arrange things so that my bed prevented the door from opening. 

This episode (and one other like it) kind of put a damper on what would otherwise have been a lovely time in Deir ez Zur…  The river was pretty and pleasant to sit by and many locals were wonderfully friendly (most notably the rest of Zahran’s family and the group of men we hung out with at the water treatment plant, of all places) but we couldn’t get past the unpleasantness and left Deir the day after we arrived.

The bustling main street of Deir ez Zur

I hate to end an entry on a downer like this, so one more positive about Syria (from among many) before finishing:

Food.  YUM.  For literally months before arriving in Syria I would regularly say to Sarah “In XXX days I’ll be in Syria eating a falaffel.” (Where XXX is a number between 1 and 120 or so.)  The food in Syria has been absolutely delicious and very, very inexpensive.  Whether it’s lunch at a falaffel stand in the street, pastries from a sweet shop or a full dinner of hummus, tabbouleh, garlic cream and shish taouk, it’s been uniformly delicious.  So much so that several times during our first week in Syria I worried aloud that I was probably regaining all the weight I lost during the first few weeks of our trip.

A falaffel stand in Aleppo.  You just walked up, ordered your falaffel, then sat around picking at the vegetables on the cart as you ate.  The red peppers were especially good… They tasted just like normal sweet peppers, but were spicy at the same time.  Yum!

I’ll finish by explaining once more that we’ve been having a fabulous time in Syria, and that 99% of the people we’ve met (men included) have been supremely friendly and welcoming… More on this, and on some of the country’s spectacular history and heritage in the next entry…

Believe it or not, this is actually a picture of the (entirely invisible in the photo) Aleppo bus station.

Tags: Aleppo, Deir ez Zur, Kassab, Lattakia, Llew Bardecki, Syria, Travel

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 6th, 2008 at 12:57 pm and is filed under Syria, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.