Getting out of Damascus ended up being rather more complicated than we had expected. The staff at our hotel had given us rather specific times—five of them, in fact—at which busses leave from the Sulmariya station on the outskirts of town to Amman. We were aiming to catch the 3pm bus and arrived at the station after having ridden the 12km through Damascus and its suburbs at about 2:15. We were beckoned by one fellow to the window of a particular company to get tickets. I was a bit dubious, being under the impression that there were competing companies with service to Amman, but it turned out that this company actually had no spaces left, it was leaving at 2:30, it was the only bus of the day, and this was the only company offering service to Amman. I called to hotel to verify the information and make sure that there wasn’t something that I was missing. Maybe there were departures from another station, or another company whose window was not yet open. The woman at reception simply insisted that there were five departures per day from the company which had just told me there was only one and seemed unwilling to accept that her information might need to be updated. (more…)
June 29, 2009
June 26, 2009
A war, in three dimensions—الحرب في ثلاثة أبعاد
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I decided to visit the Tishreen War Panorama in the morning of the day we were to leave Damascus. Tishreen Al-‘Awal is the Levantine name for the month of October, so this was a monument to the war begun on the 6th of October, 1973, commonly called the Yom Kippur War in countries allied with Israel. As in Egypt, which fought the war alongside Syria against Israel, where there are numerous roads, places and institutions named “6th October” or “10th Ramadan” (the date in the Islamic calendar), or simply “October”, Syria has done the same with “Tishreen”. One of the state newspapers, for instance, is called “Tishreen”. Unlike with al-Naksa (variously translated as “the setback” or “the debacle”) of 1967, the October War is cast as a monumental victory for Egypt and Syria, not so much due to actual territorial gains made (somewhat slight for Syria and in the negative for Egypt), but by challenging Israel’s claim to military invincibility. The same could be said of South Lebanon in 2006. With all the death and destruction on the Lebanese side, it is hard to conceive of it as anything but an ideological victory for Hizbullah, rupturing Israel’s perceived absolute military superiority while highlighting the senseless brutality of “the usurping entity” (a phrase I put in quotes only for an English-speaking audience, as it is commonplace and self-evident in the Arabic-speaking world). It is in the same way that Syria chose to pick the “recovery” of the town of Quneitra from Israel as the centerpiece of its propaganda. Quneitra is a town in the Golan Heights that Israel had occupied during “the setback”, and from which it withdrew after the ceasefire of 1973, in the process evacuating some 37,000 Arabs and dismantling every bit and piece of infrastructure that could have been used by Syrians or profited from by the Israeli contractors to whom it was sold.
June 25, 2009
Asceticism—الزهد
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As I look back upon the ride to the monastary of Deir Mar Musa al-Habashi, I have to ask myself if I wasn’t engaging in a bit of self-flagellation. It was certainly painful, if it didn’t exactly bring me closer to God. It started out well enough. I got up good and early and had to awaken the hotel manager to let me out the metal cage. I got on the road at about 4:45am, taking the main road out of Homs. I ended up on the highway for a bit, but exited and pulled a bit of a sketchy maneuver, turning around and going against traffic (I thought it was a two-way road). Soon enough, however, my intended road appeared parellel to the ramp I was on, and I rode this frontage road the remainder of the way to an-Nebek. In most places, it was simply the old Homs-Damascus highway, and it crossed back and forth across the highway every so often, almost always at surface level, with no under- or overpass. There were a number of stretches where it was right next to the highway, which gave me the peace of mind of not having to worry about being run over, while I still had to deal with the consistent engine noise. For the most part, however, the road was a good distance from the highway, and, as was the case the day before, was largely used only by the occassional motorcyclist or over-laden produce truck. I’m not sure why, but I got a particular kick out of one stretch of the road that went through the middle of a wide valley, with the northbound and southbound lanes of the highway on either side of the valley.
Homs with Tahini—حمص مع طحينة
Just after finishing that last post and heading out the door of the internet cafe, a torrential downpour struck Homs, quite unexpectedly. The streets flooded, the traffic cop across the way retreated into his little capsule and, amazingly, I didn’t see any wrecks (amazing because of the very slick roads from an unexpected rain storm, not because of the lack of intervention of the traffic cop, who mostly just seemed to scold drivers for not yielding to pedestrians anyway). Figuring the rain would clear out fairly quickly, I waited out the storm underneath an awning, casting the occasional sympathetic look towards miserable-looking cyclists (who inevitably disobeyed the traffic light, though I’m not sure if it was in haste or out of habit) and guys on mo-peds, which seem to be quite popular here. After the winds changed direction, the terperature cooled, the thunder subsided and the rain cleared, I waited a bit longer for the water on the road to clear. Since my experience in Cairo riding only a couple kilometers in a simarly unusual rain storm, I was keen to avoid getting filthy in the same way. Another 20 minutes later, there were still puddles around, but it had mostly dried up, so I made my way slowly to the main strip and the cheap hotels. (more…)
June 14, 2009
Wrong turns & chance encounters—لفات غلطة ومصادفات
We dawdled a bit on the way out of Lattakia—getting up late, having a leisurely breakfast—mostly because we thought we’d have to take care of some bureaucracy to extend our visas, which meant we would want to leave after the worst of the mid-day heat had passed anyway. It turned out however, that we could wait an entire month before we had to renew our visas, despite what the entrance stamp and other sources said. We might have waited for another day, but our guide books indicated that our next destination of Qal`at Salah ed-Din was closed the next day. So, we made a stop for coffee and then headed up the hill to the castle at around noon.
June 7, 2009
Intermodal—وصائل النقل المتعددة
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The last several days have involved travel via a number of different modes of transportation. As I noted in my last post, the folks at the Jisr ash-Shughur train station were kind enough to store our bikes for us so that we could ride the train to Damascus to meet up with Adrienne. It was a bit strange to cover the distance we had taken three days to ride (admittedly with some significant scenic detours) in just a few hours. We arrived in Damascus early in the morning the next day, after an uncomfortable night’s sleep on the train. Still, we were in better shape than Adrienne, who had apparently required a little assistance getting to sleep the previous night and was still a bit groggy. Early as it was, we had some difficulty finding some food, so we sat for a bit in a little park, where, just before we got up to leave, the sort of wingnut I’ve rarely encountered outside of Santa Cruz approached us and seemed very much to want to “help” us. He was full of all sorts of praise for the European stock from which he had decided we all came. Despite the fact that some poor Texan was waiting for him, and despite the fact the we clearly weren’t interested in his “help,” he carried on and decided we really needed to know what our names looked like in bad, blocky Arabic and Armenian calligraphy. We eventually extricated ourselves from this self-professed philologist and headed to Mayssun’s house. (more…)
June 6, 2009
The Kindness of Strangers—لطف الغرباء
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If ever there were a place that deserved to have this as their motto, Syria would be it. In the three days Elaina and I spent bike touring between Aleppo and Jisr ash-Shughur, we were constantly offered to share tea, eat food and stay the night. Even at grocery stores, we found it difficult, if not impossible, to exchange money for food or drinks. The country has so far lived up to its reputation for incredible hospitality, and that in spades. While this almost overwhelming hospitality, in combination with some pretty significant mid-day heat, has slowed down our forward progress, we have been able to travel in comfort, with most of our needs in terms of food, water, hygiene and rest generously taken care of for us.
May 31, 2009
Feeling old in Aleppo—شعور بإني عجوز في حلب
The grand plan to cycle around Syria and Jordan started to become a reality for me as we flew over the Syrian coast and the Orontes River valley. For several days I had engaged in that peculiarly modern form of global tourism, pouring over images of the northern Syrian landscape on Google Earth and Wikimapia, judging between road quality (not so large as to be an unpleasant highway nor so small as to possibly be a restricted or private road), terrain (not so steep as to be too difficult on my fixed-gear, nor so flat that we would have to suffer in the higher heat and humidity of the lowlands) and occasionally what the guide books had to say. Looking out the airplane window, as we crossed over the coastal mountains of Syria from the Mediterranean, the constellation of roads and towns and villages started to look familiar and I felt myself moving one step closer to the world below, trading in the digital eye of Google Earth for a slightly older technology that lofted my own eyes high above the earth. The challenge ahead would be to forget what Google Earth and Lonely Planet had told me about Syria, to forget what my view from the airplane window had told me, to forget all of the advice I’d been given and stories I’d been told about the place. And by “forget”, I don’t mean simply to fail to remember, but to remain cognizant and aware of all the conceived and pre-conceived notions that would shape my experience here, and to put them aside as much as possible. (more…)
