My journey to Strasbourg will be on the Orient Express.
Agatha Christie was a frequent visitor to Syria with her second husband, Max Mallowan. He was an archaeologist and worked on some of the country’s most famous sites. He is honoured in the National Museum in Damascus.
Murder on the Orient Express was reputedly written at the famous Baron Hotel in Aleppo, Syria.
I keep thinking about the Damascus streets. It’s true the names don’t really matter. It matters more what’s sold in any particular place. So you get the spice street and the animal skins street and the alley where they sell wood burning stoves. That’s Old Damascus, which is part straightened out old buildings. Straight Street where St Paul underwent his conversion to Christianity is like this.
Just behind all this, tourist friendly part, is another Old Damascus, more for people who actually live there. There are kids playing football, many old buildings well on the way to falling down. In among them some Ottoman houses have been renovated.
Elsewhere the huge Four Seasons Hotel, a major landmark, has developed a European style covered plaza complete with coffee shop chains and higher end designer labels. Behind this is an area known as Sha’alan which has Benetton, Kookai, Promod and plenty of coffee and juice bars. In the evening this is full of people out to be seen and see who and what is around.
Walking in between these areas one evening I passed a young child, about ten, sleeping on a footbridge with a selection of sweets laid out for sale on a piece of cardboard in front of her.
Heading into Turkey again the landscape becomes noticeably more lush, hills covered in fir trees and birches.
I think back to the journey out of Syria. There were five passengers; two in the front squeezed in with the driver a Taiwanese woman and I and a young guy in the back.
The car twists and turns through the dusty villages past clusters of low houses and out of town second homes built by wealthy Damascenes. The young guy leans into me as we wind through the dark. After a while I feel my leg being stroked very subtly. I can’t quite believe it’s happening so I lift up my bag from my lap and look down to check as a hand is pulled back and folded away.
I can barely keep from laughing but at the same time hope my facial contortions won’t be mistaken for approval or an invitation.
Our passports are checked five times at the border. Our papers are looked at one final time on the Syrian side by a lone soldier with a torch and then automatic metal gates slide open and we’re into the Turkish section.
I’m pretty fed up to have to head home without seeing Palmyra, there just isn’t time after a delay in Istanbul on the way out and awkward timings for connections on the way back which mean leaving early.
I feel like I just got here and have to turn right around – I have just got here.
The only option is the night bus from Damascus back up to Aleppo, then catch a bus over the border at five in the morning. It’s not the prettiest journey.
In Aleppo they say there are no buses today, I must take a taxi. Damn.
Then I get the chance to speak to a Ba’athist. He’s in his early twenties and tells me about weekly meetings reading about politics and international affairs. All his friends go too, he says. He reckons Syria is not like the US where people aren’t political and only care about their jobs and their families. ‘I care about my community’ he hedges, in answer to my questions about choice of party.
I ask him if he sees a lot of tourists pass through this way. This after someone comes in asking the route to Baghdad. His face quakes. I know he’s hearing ‘terrorists’ rather than ‘tourists’. We laugh really hard once he realises the misunderstanding.
‘Tell me’, he says, ‘is it true in Britain people hate the Arabs and the Syrians?’
I was in the Internet cafe ironing out a wrinkle in my return schedule and there were three middle-aged men in suits there - pretty unusual. After they left the guy at the desk said they were from the Government and had taken the sheets logging customers’ names and the times they were using the computers. They also downloaded a computer file, but he wasn’t sure what.
I had a definite impression this was unusual
There is pretty open access to everything in Syria, I understand, but the authorities apparently take exception to particualr sites from time to time and block them. The social networking site Facebook is currently out in the cold. Internet cafes get round the controls by using a proxy server.
The guy in the shop also said he’d given them his name and that was a problem because he was a soldier.
After all the fuss with the visa I did start to wonder about restrictions. It made me think that’s the really damaging thing, when they get into your head.
Fortunately the Syrian people are so welcoming there’s no possibility to put up barriers. The teenagers I met the other day have just sent a text inviting me to dinner. I can’t go as it’s time to turn around and head back up to Aleppo.
The huge hole in the centre of Damascus is the courtyard of the Umayyad (Umwiye?) Mosque.
A group of Japanese tourists traipses by – dutifully bound up in their Islam-friendly grey robes with pointy hoods handed out to visitors. Three Arab looking girls, about eighteen years old, sail past their grey gowns flapping open in the breeze to reveal tight jeans and tops and lots of hair and make up.
We’re surrounded by incredible green and gold mosiacs showing trees and rivers and fantastical buildings. Islamic, the guide, says but the style is more Byzantine except no human or animal form is used. That’s forbidden in Islamic art.
Whatever the origin they still impress, which was surely the real point.
The mosque is the Christian basilica turned sideways so the focus is now towards Mecca instead of along the two rows of some twenty columns to where the altar would have been. The Koranic inscription in the dome before the mihrab is along the lines of, “Be what you are and do not try to be otherwise”.
I say it’s similar to something from Shakespeare and the guide says yes but it’s a-thousand years earlier and he has a BA in Eng Lit from Damascus University.
The train station at Aleppo smells of roses. There are no roses inside but the air is perfumed somehow. It’s very lovely with a wooden ceiling and huge clusters of lamps. I’m gently guided onto the fast train to Damascus.
We pass through beautiful desert – not crowded or pretty but a spare beauty. It’s so flat, opening out to the horizon with many changing colours, like a calm sea.
And finally Damascus; it’s now after dark, but my excellent information from one who knows helps me find a cheap room and miraculously avoid being ripped off by a Damascene taxi driver.
I’m surprised by what’s in front of me, by the traffic and the fly-overs and the half-finished buildings. It’s not the romantic destination I had in mind but rather a Middle Eastern twenty-first (twentieth?) century city. I think I was expecting the thirteenth century.
Mohamed (blessed be his name) said he would not visit Damascus because he wanted to visit Paradise only once, after death. If you arrive in Paradise then the journey is over. I’m reminded that I travelled here for the joy of the journey at least as much as the destination.
