It was the night before xmas, again…

Actually it is, when writing this, because it’s the first day of Eid tomorrow (Friday), but much unlike the Dickensian version, it’s fairly warm and bedlam in the streets. We are in Saida in Southern Lebanon, where we’ve been staying with Laura. Apparently, as it is the first day of a sort of xmas (complete with lights) tomorrow, the streets will be festively awash with the blood of slaughtered lambs – ho ho ho.

As I have been slacking, thought I’d better give a quick update on progress (if any) so far….

We spent three nights in Damascus, in the end in a rather nice hotel as the cheap ones were all full and we decided we deserved it as an antidote to Jordanian hostels and worse Syrian mid-range brothel-type places. Damascus is incredible and has to be seen to be believed but it also gave us a lesson in Middle Eastern profiteering and the need to wise up – as it turns out you can’t always depend on the kindness of strangers. So, armed with the Arabic for 0-10 and the phrase ‘please use the meter’ we moved on to Palmyra out in the desert, East of Damascus.

Palmyra is the best set of Roman ruins in Syria, but we started to tire of looking at blocks of stone in the sand. Palmyra doesn’t have much to recommend itself to the intrepid explorer, despite the best efforts of the Tourist Information Officer, Jameel. Henceforth known as ‘creepy Jameel’, he sermonised to us over a fireside dinner at what turned out to be his restaurant about ‘life with a woman’, how crazy he was before he got married and how he had the insurance policy of getting another wife in the event his first one was sick for a long time. It was when he joked that he would send Paola some Italian porn to her phone that we realized it was time to call it a night.

Two days in Palmyra is a day and a half too long, so we moved on to Lattakia, what turned out to be a very ‘liberal’ (relatively low black-phantom count) laid-back (they sell beer) seaside town. While too cold for a dip in the sea, we hung out with Paola’s friend Laura and very much enjoyed her company. After taking in Salaadin’s castle, we caught the train up the coast and inland to Aleppo. The train set off at 3.30, the sun went down at 4 and we spent the next three hours in darkness interrupted only by the torch light emitted by a strange little man in a yellow jacket, who took a shine to Laura. Well he wasn’t the only one; you could feel the heat of the rioting hormones in the carriage behind us. Paola and I got married on our second day in Jordan, as definitely the easiest answer to the question that comes third in any conversation after, ‘how are you’ and ‘where are you from’. An unmarried foreign woman is considered fair game – accompanied or not. So for the next few days while we travelled with Laura, I took as a second wife. Accepted without question, the men of Syria seemed impressed, and very keen to know what I ate. I decided that steak was the best answer here, being the complete antithesis of the Syrian staple, chick peas, also we had only seen two cows in our whole time in Syria and they looked like they needed improvement in their social standing. I will be following Syrian livestock trends closely.

Aleppo was great, a bit more conservative than Lattakia, but we finally started to get a feel for the unrivalled hospitality that we had been led to expect. We returned South and on to the Crac des Chevaliers, where we spent the night en route to Lebanon.

TBC...