We wanted to visit the Syrian Orthodox monasteries in the area, and found one just a few miles off the highway. Built in AD419, there are only three monks now, though two are in hospital and it is hard to imagine them returning. Several women run a boarding school for local village boys from families who still speak Aramaic. The classes and religious services are all in Aramaic, the language of Christ’s time, but in the daytime the boys are bussed to local schools to be taught in Turkish. One of the women told us two of her brothers had been killed during Kurdish uprisings in the 1970s and 80s, when Muslim Kurds had stormed the monastery. They won’t let Muslims stay the night but we were made welcome. It was a delight to have dinner with well-behaved children and we brought what we had to the meal – some baklava and biscuits, which were well received.

Then finally to the small city of Batman, where the two crusaders parted company, Michael heading back west to get his affairs in order, and me eastwards into Iran. My first gas station tea stop was a shocker- the people were friendly enough but there were religious posters and pictures of Mecca everywhere and the manager called it the ‘Islamic Republic of Kurdistan’. Heaven help us, just what the world doesn’t need, another Islamic republic. I stopped at a rough farming town for lunch and was stopped by the police in plain clothes (this is PKK country, uniforms could make them targets). What was I doing there? This was no tourist town, they said in suspicion of my motives. Just a lunch stop, and could they direct me to a good restaurant? With help from twenty or so schoolkids who had followed me around town, their car was push-started and I followed them to the town’s only restaurant. From then on I passed more checkpoints before stopping in a small village to be mobbed by more badly dressed and worse-behaved children. One little swine hit me with a pellet gun in the back, but when I turned round and saw he was only four, I gave him a fierce-sounding bellow and he ran off in terror.

The next morning I sat down for a morning tea with some soldiers at a checkpoint where their dogs were giving me some trouble and I was just loading up my catapult before they called me in for a tea. The officers on duty joined me while their charges stood in line for inspection, but it was clear the officers were liked and respected as well as being tough. Far different from the Syrian army. The young conscripts were all good-natured enough and keen to survive their year or more serving in Kurdish Turkey, but the officers were professionals. From a couple of tea-stops at army checkpoints, all the officers are Turkish, never Kurdish. It was tempting to toady up to them by saying, in some form of mime, that the PKK should all be shot (which is my view), but it was more interesting to try and draw them out on their views of things. They didn’t talk about the Kurdish problem, nor did I ask, but their views on Islam were clear. ‘Islamic Republic – big problem. Pakistan – problem. Syria – problem. Aleman, France, Ingilterra, Christian – no problem. As for Iran, they gave a little hand wave that suggested ‘crazy’. I saw it more than once in Turkey as their opinion of Iran. Syria too sometimes gets it. Turkey has dodgy neighbours. It’s probably a Turkish army view as they are known to be a conservative force in politics. Music to my ears, though.
A good tailwind pushed me up the valley to Lake Van at 2000m. The scenery was looking more alpine, with patches of snow on the surrounding mountains. I entered the town of Tatvan where I planned to take the ferry across Lake Van and catch up a bit of time, but first I stopped for a ‘tourist information’ sign, which sadly had no English speakers (nor any information) save for one young Kurdish student sitting nearby, who was an excellent, if unpracticed speaker. I sat with him over tea for an hour or more, and asked him to tell me about the Kurds. It elicited a long list of grievances and explanations as to why the Kurds are so poor. No education, can’t join the army as they wouldn’t be allowed to pray five times a day – this guy was a first-class whinger, but I’d invited him to let loose his thoughts. The sense of grievance and victimhood that I found in other devout Muslims seems a part of the culture, and in Shia Iran, it seemed central to their identity as the killing of their ‘martyr’ Ali is still mourned as if it happened yesterday.

My new Muslim friend and his mates wanted to ask me questions. What did I think of the war in Palestine, and whose side was I on? Did I think it was true that Israeli soldiers killed babies? This was going nowhere, so I made my excuses and escaped with my life and without having to perjure myself to the ferry terminal to see when the boats run to Van, the other side of the lake. A few rust buckets sat in the harbour and there was no office, no one to ask at all but the guy running the coffee shop told me to come back around 7am and I definitely wouldn’t miss the ferry, if it ran.
I rode into town to find a hotel and stopped at the first one that had easy ground floor access for my bike. I was pleased to find the receptionist spoke good English, and sat down to chat with them as tea was brought. As he spoke, I noticed his English improving far beyond the little he claimed to know. He soon wandered onto politics via another favourite theme of the devout, that large families are good. Why they never realise that large families go hand in hand with poverty and poor education and a host of other troubles I don’t know. He thought it was Europe’s big mistake not to grow their population. I think there’s a bigger plot, a plan to dominate the world by sheer numbers. Look at Bangladesh, I said, isn’t that the result of these huge families? This only got him onto his favourite topics, such as the Great Satan. I was starting to feel a vague unease and dismay that I had allowed this conversation to go this way when he said
“Osama made a big mistake. He should have used a nuclear bomb”.
I froze for half a second and without thought or any explanation got up and said slowly “I am going” and walked out leaving the tea on the table. I was mortified at the sheer evil of this remark and though I felt no personal danger, wanted to get well away from a man who thought that way. The PKK has many supporters in Kurdistan. But a few minutes later I had found a peaceful and friendly place where tea and polite conversation was the order of the day. I found a nice spot for dinner and was welcomed by even the long-beards in the corner. It’s a great relief that the truly devout have little interest in politics or nationality, and from that springs true hospitality.
The ferry left around 10 the next morning. It carries trains across the lake and the ferries are designed with low sterns to take the carriages directly onto the boat. The problem comes when the weight of the boat is altered by train carriages coming on or off, and I saw the other ferry rise about a foot above the dock where its connection to the dock had slipped. The trains run to Iran, sometimes carrying passengers, mostly Iranians working in Turkey. It was a wonderful day as the only passenger on the boat, no kids to bother me, music to listen to and clouds and mountains up to 4000m to watch. Van was a bit more in touch with life than Tatvan and I had a last beer in a back alley to steel myself for Iran. I made a few phone calls from a phone booth place and the guy at the desk let me call for free both times. I write this partly to remind myself how many great Kurds there are. It’s never a matter of money with these guys, they know you’ve got more than they have, it’s pure hospitality and friendliness towards a foreign visitor.
My last day in Turkey was the best riding, few cars heading east to the Iranian border, wide pasture meadows and tufty clouds sauntering past me, a lunch in the only non-smoking restaurant I’ve come across in Turkey, then a visit to the student house of some young Kurdish lads who all seemed to be dreadfully serious about religion. I think I preferred hanging out with the bad lads across the road waiting for the electric power to come back on in the internet cafe, but I couldn’t refuse the offer of a tea. You need a good reason to refuse Middle Eastern hospitality. Eight students living together, all male of course, and several keen beard-growers among them. Far too courteous to grill me on my country’s role in the world, though Israel’s always fair game to them. I could tell the West is a decadent place in their minds. So lacking in any experience of adult life, their minds were full of dangerous certainties. Islam, the victim religion, so peaceful, so harmless. I began to see them as the enemy – I was sitting having tea with the enemy. Not my personal enemy, not my country’s enemy, but the enemy of freedom, the arts and all cultured life, of women, of pop music and everything we hold dear in the West and all the rubbish we put up with too as the price of freedom. All this would go if the young bearded ones had their way.

I rode on, again enjoying the freedom my bike gave me to choose my own escape route, down an unpaved road that ran straight to the border. It was riding that cyclists would give their eye teeth for, more wide meadows, skylarks soaring, singing at the top of their climb and then falling back to earth, flocks of sheep, led by pushy goats and friendly sheepdogs and young shepherds, all with the wind at my back. I rejoined the road and rolled down a fairly steep valley for the last few kilometres to stop abruptly at the border, which looked closed for good. I’d chosen a little used border, not the busy one to the north at Dog Biscuit (no traveller can pronounce the Turkish name). A shepherd appeared from nowhere and explained to me with a lot of hand waves that this border was closed to all but trains, but that a train ran at midnight – the one coming off the ferry. We walked back to the small station and he stopped to have a snack and share his food with me, sitting on the unused road and gave me the rest of his cheese that he’d taken to Iran (a little harmless smuggling taking the high route) to sell. The station welcomed me as their only piece of business in a long time and the young and very switched-on customs guy took me under his wing. Husseyn is from the West, ie not a Kurd, but all the other staff are. His spot is so isolated he has to climb a 500m mountainside every evening to call his fiance. He offered me his flat to have a nap if I wanted, or take a shower and use the internet. Perfect, and when he was calling his girl, I sat with the station’s post office manager and had tea with him and listened to Turkish music. At 10pm, Husseyn had finished his long nightly phone call and took me to his friends’ flat for dinner. It was one of the best meals I had in Turkey, stuffed peppers and aubergines, plenty of bread to mop it up, all served on the carpet with newspaper spread out as a tablecloth. At midnight the train pulled in and the guys helped me through Immigration and Customs – I’d met all those guys beforehand and had tea with a few, then introduced me to the Iranian train crew and got my bike on the train. All fabulous, and the perfect way to leave Turkey on a good note and stop dwelling on the few duds I’d met.

After a few days in Aleppo we were well kippered from the smoke and struck out towards the ancient ruins at Ebla. It’s thought to be the first city in the World, meaning there’s not much left, just foundations but of a large city thought to have been built for an aristocratic class only, around 3000 b.c. The city stood in middle of a raised area walled by a 3km long circular earth wall, now a hillside. We had a hard ride there through dust and din and finally a 25km slog along the motorway. The roar of traffic was enough to make me try something I said I’d never do, which was to listen to music in an attempt to drown out the noise and give me some calmness, but it only fed my irritation. I thought Simon & Garfunkel might do the trick, but in the gritty mood I was in, their soft singing only sounded complacent and superficial. Then the bland duo stuck the knife in:

“Gee but it’s great to be back home. Home is where I want to be….”

“Bastards!”, I raged internally, because they were right. I vowed to go through their music later and delete all but the very best, but we were close to the end of the day’s ride. We couldn’t find a camping place and Ebla is in the middle of farmland where we would easily be seen. We passed through the little village, went up to the site and were told we couldn’t camp there. We rode back to the village and asked for help. In Syria and probably in many Muslim countries this triggers a reaction as it hits that hospitality button quite hard. Our problem becomes their problem. And luckily – always – an English speaker pops up, and twenty or thirty kids and a long process of finding a place begins, seemingly involving half the village. Someone telephoned up to the site and now that the staff had left and the night-watchman was there, he said we were welcome to camp under their faux-Bedouin tent in the middle of the site, which is what we wanted in the first place.

Our host spoke no English but keeping him company for the evening was his cousin, who spoke it fluently. A teacher from the village, he was a very devout Muslim and only too keen to talk about it at length. I have to say I didn’t quite click with him but thankfully Michael did, enabling me to drop out of the conversation as I find discussing religion with humourless zealots to be as pleasant as dental surgery and my facial expressions would have given my feelings away, in fact they probably did. The truth is I find the calm certainty these characters have reminds me of talking to Marxists in the 1970s (and where’s their Second Coming/Revolution?). Drives me crazy! Is there no room for doubt? As someone who once made not a bad career out of risk and uncertainty, I find dogmatism, well, boring at best, but it’s such a limited, one-sided view of the world. I’m with Doubting Thomas. But for the record, my tormentor told us he hates the extremists and terrorists. They give Islam a bad name, he says. He’s for a peaceful takeover and yes, he thinks they will take over the World. North Africa, that was part of the Project, as he calls it, and Spain, well they invited the Muslims in, he told us, so they’ve never really invaded anywhere and are a peaceful religion. He doesn’t always get to prayers and his daughter tells him he’s not a good Muslim (I’d give her a good cuffing if I were him, but it reminds me of Nazi children turning in their parents, and besides, what a rotten child to have!). And praying shouldn’t get in the way of work, for ‘Work is the first Adoration’ in the Koran, he tells us. Well you wouldn’t know it in this country, where running a hotel is about spending 18 hours a day watching TV and zero hours spent cleaning.

We left Ebla very impressed with the hospitality and dependability of the people we met, who live in an economy which is largely cashless, the shops selling only things they cannot make or grow easily. The Bedouins, I don’t know if they were Bedouins or just people who dress like them, seem to be masters of hospitality. We’ve met several teachers now and they all seem to be very high calibre types. One of the shepherds we met spoke excellent English and is studying Physics at Aleppo University. He was just watching his father’s flock for a few days and had to shear some sheep when we met him. It’s a hard environment, with the noise of tractors and farm equipment, naturally with kids riding on top, drowning out conversation and people shouting at each other no matter how close, and dust swirling around as vehicles pass. At first look as we rode through, they looked as though they’d happily slice us to pieces, but when we left the next morning, it was like leaving many new friends.

We had a long journey to the southwest to visit Saladin Castle and negotiated for a truck to take us there. We missed strong headwinds and a steep 1500m pass. Another night camping at a restaurant, the tent tied to those ubiquitous white plastic chairs to hold it up, and then a ride down to the coast.

Syria’s coast is no beauty and the military seem to have bagged three quarters of it for themselves, with antiquated missiles and anti-aircraft guns pointing out to sea. On the way we met Alex, a Slovenian cyclist on his way to Beijing and spent the night with him camping at a restaurant on the beach. It was our best night yet, I felt. Alex was good company, if a little batty in my view. His blue lycra outfit would be embarrassing in any country but was particularly so in Syria, it left nothing to the imagination and he’s tall too, so, well I leave you to guess. Syrians would never say anything, he’s foreign and so a guest and it’s sporting gear, so in Syria, he gets away with it. I have yet to meet a rude person here. The restaurant was the usual falling-to-bits affair with an attempt at a hotel but they haven’t seen guests in years. It was how I imagine Cuba to be, and the young guys who work there, they were thrilled to have us there and entertained us royally. The young men, I thought, seemed a bit socially disadvantaged to say the least; they lived in the restaurant, sleeping on foam mattresses on the floor. An older man, Johnny, who is a Christian and says he doesn’t like Turkey because it’s anti-Christian whereas Syria is tolerant of all religions, looks after them as a father figure.

We left with Alex the next morning, hoping to ride with him but knowing that we had no chance or desire to keep up with his 200km a day plan (I don’t think he even came close to this as we heard he was not far away two days later). I told him I couldn’t bear the noise of his gears so if he wanted to ride with us, he had better let me fix them. I know, a bit bossy of me but he was grinding his rig to bits. But shortly after that, a gear cable broke on Michael’s bike so we had to stop and replace that and Alex pedalled off. He was a bit of a character but you’d have to be a bit mad to want to cycle across Iraq, as he hoped to do.

More military bases, more hooting, a foul-air bonus of riding past an oil refinery in the middle of Allawi country, the Allawis being the tribe that the ruling family come from, meaning more than the usual saturation coverage of pictures of the Assad family on every flat surface. More headwinds too and a storm brewing, spirits drooping amid the plastic bags and filth swirling around us, and we stopped at a little shop, hoping to find shelter and something from their shelves with which to make a lunch. In fact it was abnormally clean and they had all the junk food cyclists crave, sweet biscuits and ice cream and a large tub of yoghurt (it’s good here) with a jar of apricot jam for sweetening. Our new hosts were sitting down to watch some UEFA cup football and were pleased to have us. More tea had to be turned down in order for us to reach the next town, Tartous, where we took a room in the best hotel, the Grand, another run-down Cuban type of place with a balcony overlooking the unfinished esplanade and the sea.

Here we met Michael of Colorado, so his shirt read, a Syrian who had emigrated to the US as a boy, served in the US Airforce and had divorced his American wife because he wanted to come back to Syria to retire. His fluent English and distinct Colorado accent intrigued us and we were keen to meet him the next day as he promised to tell all about Syria and he also wanted to show us the palace he had bought for only $50,000. I should have remembered that he’d told us he was a real estate salesman in the US before accepting the offer. Michael of Colorado sat in the hotel lobby telling us of the great life he had found here and while I sat watching him to take a photograph, I noticed that he never smiled. No matter how good the story sounded, it could not possibly be true coming from this face. He took us in his Lada (”Better than any Porsche or Mercedes I’ve owned”) to his flat, a sad bachelor place with not even a proper kitchen, just a gas burner to make tea. A cheap tiled floor with identical prints on each tile. He has plans for a 40 unit apartment block, he writes to the President of Syria with suggestions on reforms of the telephone system, he’s going to Alexandria to find a woman who wants to come back to Syria with him to be his companion and clean for him (anyone know somebody who might be interested?), but we realised we’d simply made a mistake in accepting his hospitality, for Michael of Colorado was desparately lonely, a good example of the expat who comes home only to be viewed with suspicion by his compatriots whom he wished would accept him back. At 73, with dodgy knees, overweight and alone, we felt dreadfully sorry for him. What madness had made him leave a wife and proximity to America’s veterans’ hospitals and take his last dollars to sink them irretrievably into this flat?

One of the delights of cycling was that we could experience all this and ride off happily the next day and leave it all behind. We had a hard ride up to Krak de Chevaliers, the altitude isn’t so great at 620m up from sea level where we started, but the ups and downs are many and steep enough to have us walk the last climbs. We camped at the nearest restaurant less than 100m from the castle itself and spent a happy day wandering round the castle and talking to some Dutch motorbikers who camped alongside us. The region is said to be Allawi, but around Krak it’s all Christian villages, and our restaurant owner was a Shi’ite.

One can have a fairly harmless political conversation in Syria by just asking “Bush?” and then any Syrian will give the thumbs down or make some yucky sound, then, “Arafat?” and he makes another, more pleasant sound, and so on until every Middle Eastern and World leader we can think of has been covered, and we all know where we stand on the key loyalties. He had some posters up of the Hezbollah leader Nusralluh that make him look like a Kalashnikov-armed Robin Hood. Nusralluh is the only terrorist one can permissibly support in Syria, and we’ve seen posters of Ahadinejad, Assad and Nusrallah together (the funds and weapons flow from left to right) in Damascus, though I dare not photograph them. Extremism is frowned upon, unless it’s state-sponsored. So the papers denounce foreign interference in Lebanon, except their own, of course, which is in support of Lebanon’s sovereignty and Hezbollah’s fight against the Wolf to the south, we are told.
We rode east to Homs with the wind behind us through 6 checkpoints on the Lebanon border. The men wore uniforms but without any identification or insignias and were armed but we were waved through as they drank tea, ate ice creams or watched the telly. They weren’t the usual scrawny 18-year olds but in their 40s, possibly working for Customs, possibly trusted units of the President himself, this being a country where trust is valued above competence in all such matters. Homs showed the wonder of cycling yet again, for it’s a town few people would visit with little tourist infrastructure and hence more friendliness and less over-charging. Cyclists discover these places by accident, but this process works. We picked a grubby fleapit with a nostalgic look that made me think of Indian hotels where coughing and throat clearing would be the norm. The nearby roundabout was full of a lively crowd gathering for a public hanging of two youths convicted only the day before of a ghastly murder for which special approval from the President had been sought – and received – for the death sentence. We took our tea on the balcony to watch the crowd and excitement growing and had the predictable discussion on whether the hanging would be right or not, Michael thinking perhaps with such a short trial and me saying we had to respect local customs and that most people in Britain (eg Sun and Daily Mail readers) would happily hang those convicted of such offences, but thankfully we didn’t have to witness it, not that we could have beared to do so. The police charged the crowd with batons flailing several times to allow traffic through, and the idea that the execution would be public was just a fantasy anyway.

We had a fine time wandering the old town, with many Middle East Colonial-looking buildings of less than a century’s age looking softly worn and crumbled. Next day we found an internet cafe and as the manager was such a good speaker of English and so helpful, I took the chance of asking him a few questions about religion, but he quickly beckoned me outside with “that man there, he is my friend, but he works for Secret Police”, then helpfully adding “in fact I do, too, but it’s better he doesn’t hear”, which ended whatever it was we were talking about and I asked him about the weather instead.

On to Damascus by bus – 180km of motorway saved – and we’ve settled in for a few days. The Syrians claim Damascus is the World’s oldest capital city and it has a wonderful and enormous and thriving Old City just a short walk away from our hotel. The neighbourhood is similar in style to the Old City, narrow streets with houses and mosques cheek by jowl and overhanging windows on each side just inches apart. Mediaeval masonry, plaster and timber like exposed or poking out of walls supporting floors and balconies in a very organic, natural style seen in only one or two streets in Britain, such as York’s Shambles. Here it’s widespread, though so many buildings are neglected and have whole corners knocked off or bulldozed in the name of progress . Thousands of years old, it’s still very liveable and efficient for people, only to be ruined by cars determined to push their way down the narrowest alleys. Yet these neighbourhoods are Syria’s riches, not the damned cars that will come and go in less than the blink of an eye compared with these elegant communities.

The jewel in the Old City is the Ummayad Mosque, the Islamised Byzantine cathedral dating back to the 4th or 5th century. The old nave is 157m long inside, were it still a cathedral I think it would be the World’s longest. As it runs West to East, muslim worshippers face sideways, to the south, for their prayers. In the middle lies the tomb of John the Baptist, but I was told there’s probably only a toenail of the saint, if that, and that many churches lay claim to parts of him. The marble-floored inner courtyard of the mosque is magnificent on a bright day and children play happily and families picnic. Women unsuitably dressed, which is most of them, must borrow a special robe to cover themselves before entering. They sit at the back during prayers and in every mosque have their own, clearly inferior entrance. We walked on to the Iranian mosque nearby, dedicated to the daughter of Ali, the Shia martyr, and enjoyed its mirrors, light and gaudiness, and ostentatious prayer too. On to Saladin’s tomb and the Roman Jupiter’s temple, now just a few arches and columns which support part of the Souk and elsewhere stand alone in testament to Rome’s great engineering, if not her now forgotten Gods.

And then to a hammam, the best one we have yet found. Costing only 5 euros for the works, ie quick massage and scrape with a loofah glove as well as the sauna and steam room, the owner claims this hammam is 1023 years old. It’s well maintained and top quality with a very warm steam room. I have to say it’s fairly gay too but everything’s above board and Lawrence would have had nothing to worry about here. After my massage the masseur said to me “You very nice” to which I smiled “Thank you very little”, which was completely stupid but off I went for a final cold shower, then out to be cocooned like a babe in more clean towels and to sit drinking tea in the lobby. One of the staff stands guard with a towel to preserve your dignity as you get dressed, rather like Mum used to do on the beaches when we were kids. These are simply incredible places, an interesting counterpoint to Japan’s onsens. People are by and large far more at ease in a hammam, there are no strict rules you could break, unlike Japan, and the staff guide you with ease by gestures around the place. You wear a towel at all times and can spend as long as you want in there. You’re never made to feel unwelcome in these places, or in mosques either . There are so many Syrians taking photos that a foreigner doing so is absolutely nothing at all.

I sat down to have a quiet late afternoon beer by myself at a little hole-in-the-wall cafe where I know the owner has some beer hidden. No sooner had I taken my first sip than the two Syrian guys either side of me both homed in to strike up a conversation. Secret policemen again? I asked them what they did for a living as they routinely ask us age, marital status etc. so why not, but I couldn’t shake them off to enjoy my beer in peace. They wanted to know what I thought about marriage, and did I believe in love (I had no great insights into either, I’m afraid to say) and finally, what were the virtues I looked for in a woman? I should have given Ataturk’s reply, which was “availability” but I don’t think they’d have got it.

We’re now in Syria, the self-styled Cradle of Civilization, and very glad to be here. The ubiquitous Ataturk we saw in Turkey has now been replaced by His Omnipresence, shown above, who can only be referred to in a coded way for reasons of self-preservation. Though from the customs and immigration procedures we experienced, there’s not much to worry about with the Syrian government for tourists – they want the money.

But first, we had a great last few days in Turkey in the ancient city of Antioch, or Antakya as the Turks called it. They’ve only controlled Antioch for some 70 years, it was previously part of Syria but geographically it fits far better with Turkey; the change in scenery to stock ‘Biblical-looking’ begins at the border. Antioch’s a great little town and has a long history on the Silk Road as the largest Roman town in the region through which all east-west traffic came. It has only a couple of hundred thousand inhabitants now, but in the 1920s over 250,000 died in an earthquake. We walked up above the town to visit St. Peter’s cave, which more accurately was owned by St. Luke and is believed to be the oldest place of worship still in existence from the early Christian period. Services are still available for groups of pilgrims, but for phonies like us, perhaps not. We’ve left our pilgrim credentials at home this time. Unfortunately there were rocks falling from the cliffs above the two times we tried to visit and it was closed. Antioch has a fantastic collection of Roman mosaic floors in its museum, a sprawling covered market and a couple of hamams. We looked

into one rather seedy hamam in the market and found we’d stepped into a grungy underworld, the sole attendant was pacing round dressed in only his underwear and a grubby dust-filled wig. He saw us and went to put on an incredibly filthy towel round his waist and beckoned us over, but let me tell you there was no way I would lie face down on a massage table with this guy in charge, or face up for that matter. We high-tailed it out of there and went to the one just behind our hotel, which also needed a bit of a refurb but had bags of character and antiquity to it. The hamam we had visited in Antalya touted itself as being 600 years old, and it probably was, but I suspect that many of them are of similar vintage. Only in Antalya we paid about 17 Euros for the full monty – soap massage and oil massage. Here we paid only 2.50 Euros for just the bath, which it really isn’t, it’s a mild steam sauna and a good washing with running water poured over ourselves from small pales. It was a bit decrepit but for 2.50 it’s the equivalent of the fast-disappearing local public baths in Japan, the sentos. It’s a great tradition, a chance to actually use and experience something that’s been around for hundreds of years for a price that is next to nothing. Hamams always have small domed roofs with glass stars or hexagons cut into the roof in odd (or rather, sophisticated) geometric shapes and are usually near mosques, though everything is near a mosque in Turkey and so far, in Syria too.

We had a dream-ride from Antioch to Aleppo in Syria, two days of steady warm tailwinds and beautiful farmland scenery. I didn’t have a Syrian visa and was hoping to get one at the border, and was not disappointed. In fact Michael had more difficulty getting in as they asked him the key question in their visa approval process, a question concerning his previous regional travels. He’s been bounced at the border before by Syria, and this time they got very excited by a visa from Mauritius, thinking it was this other country referred to by travellers only as ‘Disneyland’. But we made it, and while waiting at the border we met round-the-world motorbiker Nick Sanders, who interviewed ‘Knight of the Road Sir Michael Kiljan’ for a podcast on his website http://www.nicksanders.com .

The scenery changed drastically as we passed through the line of low hills that marks the border between Turkey and Syria. It’s immediately more rocky, arid and ‘Biblical’ looking and buildings are low and cream-coloured. Goat country. We stopped to change money at the first village we came to, getting a not so great rate but appreciating the convenience – and a cold beer. Syria’s not dry – that’s great news, and a good indication that Syria is not a country of religious extremism. The Syrian beers were all around the 10% alcohol mark so I picked a familiar Turkish beer – only to find it was a mere 9% alcohol after I’d bought it. In the euphoria of getting a visa and our both going to a new country together for the first time, I chugged it down and we headed off into a fine evening ride, but instead of finding horses and carts, we rode amongst the most maniacal drivers I have ever experienced, it was like India at high speed. When the ten year-old drove past us on a tractor towing a water tanker, that was it for me. I really regretted the beer, it made it hard to concentrate with traffic around us flying by, stopping, starting and sometimes reversing without warning, yelling and honking at us while the road broadened and narrowed for no reason. It got worse as we approached Aleppo, I think it was payday and everyone was off the fields and heading into town. Syria’s a mandatory crash-helmet country for bikers, sad to say. The road crossed over a section of Roman road in excellent condition after 2000 years and still in use today.

We knew we wouldn’t make Aleppo that evening, and as light fell our choices evaporated as to where we could stay for the night. A sign for camping led us 2 km up a side road and to the home of a Belgian-Syrian couple. Crystal, also seemingly dressed as an extra for Life of Brian, is a Belgian woman now living in Syria. She hasn’t converted to Islam, being a non-believer (shhhh….) but she chooses to dress that way, and to sit on the ground when she wants to, refusing offers of a mat. They have a few small businesses and take in campers and she’s starting to grow food on their half-acre plot. She’s done a good job with the solar showers and clean toilets too.

We spent an hour finding the hotel my guidebook recommended, the Al Gawaher, but would have found it in minutes if only I hadn’t lost my compass. A hotel could be a few blocks away in this town and no one would know of it. It’s the best budget place in Aleppo and they let us camp on the roof where we have plenty of space and shade and a view. The breeze at night is wonderful and we watch the neighbours on their roof-tops. They all seem to be pigeon-fanciers and many have a soft spot for the hordes of cats who wander the side streets and roof-tops at night. Dogs are nowhere to be seen, this being a Muslim land.

The food was a big hit straight away, especially at lunchtime when it’s freshly prepared. The local fast food – falafels and a soupy mix pronounced ‘fool’ is just to my taste. ‘Fool’ consists of large beans like fava beans, chickpeas, some yoghurt and olive oil and spices. There are so many more spices than I have eaten in this kind of food before. We’ve had cups of coffee with cardamoms mixed in, mint leaves with everything, new variations on baklava. It’s very inventive. Dinner is a bit duller, it looks as though it’s been prepared earlier and just kept warm, though if we could speak Arabic we could ask for something to be made fresh for us. The water is drinkable as far as I can see, but getting a bottle avoids some of the rather excessive handling that drink, food, cups and plates etc usually seem to get.

We went to see the Citadel, the enormous castle that still dominates the now sprawling city. Every building is the same dusty dun colour and there’s been little new building in the last forty years, a lot of the newer buildings faring worse than their much older neighbours, as is so often the case in the Middle East. The wall the Byzantines built around Constantinople has lasted much longer than the half-century old slums next to it. The walk back from the Citadel through the covered souk is at least a mile long.

We strolled around the Christian quarter as it seems to be the oldest surviving medieval neighbourhood in Aleppo, lots of narrow alleys and low archways that keep cars out.

It’s a very tolerant country in terms of religion, there are a couple of Armenian churches, the larger Syrian Orthodox Church and the Greek Catholic church we went to this morning. There were just half a dozen worshippers plus two very dubious-looking sinners at the back and a grumpy priest who we thought spoke and sang in several different languages through the service. I thought it a brave little outpost of Christianity but when we went to the Forty Martyrs Cathedral almost next door to watch a bit of the Armenian Orthodox service, there were over a hundred people and it looked like a thriving place. We have seen a few heavily wrapped Muslim women in the streets, but the percentage overall looks to be less than one might find on the streets of London – my feeling is the Muslims over here are more moderate than the ones that made it to Britain, as a generalisation. We saw a lot of Bedouins working the fields when we rode in and saw their tents too, but in the whole time we spent in Turkey and here I have only seen one man with the full ‘mujahedeen’ look, ZZ Top beard and all. Aleppo’s streets have a wonderful variety of religious dress and of course non-religious dress with no feeling that anything is being imposed on women. Shorts are OK for sports or male tourists though I did see some kids following a western woman in shorts and laughing at her. Talking of dress, someone in turkey did ask us if we were in the military, which made me a little nervous. Actually these clothes are working out great, the shirt sometimes gets soaked while riding but is breezy and easily washed out, and keeps the sun off very well. I didn’t wear it for the entry to Syria though. Perhaps we should tell them we’re Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade veterans? Mike vetoed that idea.