The Mad and the Bad

We’ve been here a couple of weeks now, but still the welcomes still come as if we’d just arrived, in shops, on the street, from policemen, all the time. It’s as if they’ve been told to say it but it comes with a smile and they know it’s a winner. And it is, for they are a charming people who love politeness and kind words but aren’t bothered too much by formalities. I suspect and certainly hope my refusing of so many offers of tea as we ride through the countryside has not caused any offence as hospitality is the highest form of generosity. Also it’s rare that one gets to see inside a Syrian home anyway so perhaps I was unwise to refuse, but we’d never have gotten anywhere if I hadn’t gestured that we really needed to press on. And a few times I accepted an offer of a cup of tea only to find it was the cup of tea my kind host was in the middle of drinking. We recoil a bit at the excessive handling food and drinks receive in Syria, it’s the easiest way to suffer minor stomach troubles but I think our refusals are not looked on so harshly as we’re foreigners and can’t be expected to follow all their rules.

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.