move back home
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posted at 10:39 PM

Downhill in Deir
When I’d first arrived at the hotel, I collapsed on the bed, and pulled off my boots. My feet were a revolting mess: bitten again and again, and the bites rubbed raw by a day’s walking around. A nap and a tepid, drizzly shower later, it was something of a trial to put socks and boots back on, on the tender flesh. But I couldn’t just sit there and stare at them. There were things to do, places to go. So I swore a great deal, and went out to explore.

I was surprised by Deir ez Zur. It was pretty enough—with bright flowered vines and creepers across painted walls, long streets with ornate iron gateways leading into shady courtyard gardens—and the suspension bridge across the Euphrates was a slender, elegant ribbon full of strolling families. But almost everyone stared at me, and stepped out my way like they might catch something nasty. It was the first, the only place in Syria, where I’d met with overt hostility.

Deir’s a fairly modern town—an outpost of the French Foreign Legion, and a crossroads on a couple of main roads, but it’s taken an economic downturn fairly recently. The oil companies have left, the airport’s been closed, and most of the businesses that depended on this foreign money have been badly hit. That may explain why I felt like I should have been carrying a bell, and calling out ‘unclean, unclean!’ as I walked around on my own, a shameless Western hussy, striding around the city and not spending my tourist dollars in an expensive hotel, like a respectable person would.

Crossing the river, marvelling at the colours below me, the little boys splashing around in the water, I was pursued by a couple of teenagers on bikes. They were acting like any bored kids in some 1970s Sunday afternoon concrete shopping centre—getting in the way, whistling, shouting, and generally showing off and bristling with vaguely comical attempts at intimidation. But, in a place as welcoming as Syria, this was a shock. They rode off, leaving me baffled, as two more boys fell into step.

“Hello, hello. Where are you from? What is your name?”
“Er…Hello…”
“FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU, TOURIST!”
Exeunt, at high speed, cackling with laughter.

But I found my way to the café on the far side of the river, past the empty sports centre and the rusting, deserted play park, and sat by the river, watching the sun fall and the stars rise. On the bridge, kids clambered up and down the suspension cables, and paraded along railings. The bullfrogs hit their full-throated croaking to such an extent that one of the skinny white dogs in the reeds lay down, utterly miserable, with his paws over his ears. Cats pounced on crickets and lizards, and ambled around tables checking for scraps. I slapped at my much-nibbled skin, drank tea, picked at a too big plate of salad, read fairytales, and watched the descent through every blue into darkness.

I read, wrote, and stared at the reflections of the changing sky on the water. Waiters came and went, trying to persuade me to take a trip with their cousin, their brother, their very good friend and his 4WD to this place or that place. But I had plans, and I was getting tired of defending them against the quest for the dollar. I packed up my stuff, wrapped another bit of salad into some bread, and headed out along the dark paths. Where I came face to face with a very large, very white, very angry goose.

The goose bobbed his head up and down, wings up, and hissed madly at me. I stopped, and ummed and ahhed. The goose honked and growled, lunging towards me. I told the goose to piss off and leave me alone. The goose charged at me. I took three steps backwards, to avoid it, hit a raised stone, and fell on my arse into the middle of a flowerbed.

The goose looked triumphant, snaking his head around, and hissing a little more. I burst out laughing, sitting there in the crumpled flowers and shrubs, salad sandwich all over my lap. I couldn’t stop; I was howling with laughter. There didn’t seem to be any other option. A gaggle of waiters rushed over to the commotion, and went into flappy-panic mode: two trying to herd the goose away, and getting pecked for their troubles, two wringing their hands and apologising. Two more helped me up, baffled by my helpless giggling.

“Don’t cry, madam, don’t cry!”
“Bwah-ha-ha-ha!”
“Very bad goose. Very rude goose. No good manners!”

All the way back to the hotel, every time I saw a hostile glower, or heard a whisper, I felt like I’d been dropped into an absurd fairytale, where all the townspeople had been turned into malevolent geese.

+ + + + +

Hours later, exhausted but wide-awake in a hot room, I was busy cursing everything about the town.

I’ve never been good at heat, but I assumed that the dryness of the desert would be easier than the humidity I’d grown to loath in Hong Kong. But all my previous hot country travelling had been in the winter. And this was an unusually warm late spring. Wrapped inside a sleeping sheet, under a stuttering fan, I couldn’t believe how hot I got. But any limb that was exposed to a breeze was studded with vicious red mosquito bites within minutes. I have a knack of attracting every mozzie within miles. I’ll get bitten by every single one of them, and everyone else will be wondering why I’m slapping at myself, swearing madly, and grumbling about bloodsucking little bastards, when they are serenely untouched.

Most of the bugs in Eastern Syria had helped themselves to a little of my blood. Mari was the worst. There were screens over the windows, so, I’d blithely swung the windows wide open, and not noticed the large tears in them until the morning. In Deir ez Zur, the bugs swarmed around the river. Yes, I got bitten more, but that was my own silly fault—I’d spent about four hours sitting at a cafe, in the evening, right by the water. That night, the glossy white room was stifling, and ever other guest was heavy-footed, loud of voice, and full of singing. I was hot, itchy, and tired, and this was starting to make me grouchy. More annoyingly, it was starting to overwhelm the extreme happiness I’d felt walking through Palmyra, Dura and Mari.

I’m a terrible hypocrite, when it comes to travelling. One part of me wants to buy a camel and cross the desert, just because there’s a desert to cross. The other part of me gets all whiny when my feet hurt, I’m too hot, the map’s making no sense, and, damn it, I’m tired now. Some days all I want to do is sit outside a café and watch other people getting on with their life, even if one of the most spectacular sights in the country is just a couple of miles away and I really should go and see it, as I’m here. Two minutes later, I’ll be muttering about idiot tourists who appear at a ruined city, take a photograph, and hop back into their icily air-conditioned 4WD. In theory, I’m happy to rough it. But after three nights of fractured sleep, sweating to death and eaten alive, I’m dreaming of baths and clean white sheets.

All the careful planning I did--all of the mapping out of routes and itineraries--came undone just three days after I left Palmyra. I’d intended to stop at Deir ez Zur for a night, after visiting Dura Europos, see Resafeh the next day, and then head up to Aleppo, sleeping in Raqqa if there wasn’t enough time to get so far. But I was in such a foul mood, tired out, over-heated, and with seventy bites on my feet and ankles, my skin was raw inside my boots, I was going to get the hell out at Deir ez Zur, straight on a bus to Aleppo, to give myself some time to sort myself out before doubling back.

Once I’d beaten myself up about being a wimp, I decided to save my travelling honour a little by visiting Deir’s museum before hopping on a bus back to civilisation. I asked the chap at the hotel to write down ‘museum’ in Arabic—al matHaf—so I could wave it at a taxi driver, and get to see the mythical wonders of Syria: a museum with usefully labelled exhibits. My Arabic is slightly below abysmally pathetic (it doesn’t help that a. I have a lisp, and b. I can’t roll the letter r), so the trick of getting things written down has paid off beautifully in the past.

So I paid my bill, shouldered my pack, and flagged down a cab. Not an easy task. The first three decided to play ‘aim for the tourist’ then drove away at high speed once they’d had the pleasure of seeing me leap backwards into vegetable market rubbish. The fourth studied the piece of paper with extreme care and took me straight to the bus station.

I took the first bus back to Aleppo.


posted at 3:46 PM

Dura Europos: sparkly walls and crumbled temples
It took a while before I was able to peel myself away from the family in the morning, even though I’d planned to get cracking first thing. I’d woken early after a lousy night, too hot in a bright, moonlit room under the water tower. The room was full of the whine of mosquitoes, and the chattering of night birds, and I’d tossed and turned, sticky with sweat, sleeping only in half hour patches. I lay in bed, in the early morning, listening to the chickens and the sounds of people getting up to start their day, and tottered down with my pack. I was herded into the back courtyard, the family’s area, to sit on a step and join the second sitting of breakfast. The boys were already at work in the garden, but we were drinking tea.

The youngest children had yoghurt mixed into their tea—a rather revolting looking concoction of gloopy pale brown—but the rest of us feasted on yesterday’s bread, and sweet fresh butter, while Madam gave the family their marching orders for the day. We went through several exuberant cycles of thank you, and farewell, before I was able to extricate Madam from her flock for a slightly embarrassing exchange about payment. I lurched off along the track, waving madly, loaded down with extra bottles of water, and a skinful of mosquito bites.

I’d barely reached the main road, and sat down on my pack when an empty micro stopped to see what I was waving about. Dura? Sure. No problem. But first, there was his breakfast. The badly shaved driver unwrapped a half-fossilised shwarma from its shiny greaseproof paper, and demolished it in two minutes flat, chewing like a starved wolf. I watched in horror, before he caught my eye in the prayer-bead draped mirror, and blushed.

+ + + + +

It’s not far up the road to Dura Europos, about 25 kilometres. I’d seen the flash of white walls the day before, across a flat, stony plain, when I was heading down to Mari. But the walk from the main road, to the entrance, is one of those deceptively long kilometres. The walls of the city refused to come closer, however many steps I took. There was nothing, nothing at all around me, except for one house along the way, with paint cans hanging from its fences, and dust-covered foliage looking forlorn in the vegetable patch. I turned around and around, gazing across the emptiness, trying to work out why the fortress had been built here. No one has ever quite worked that out; there are no clear answers as to why this spot was chosen over any other.

Dura was established at the time when Alexander the Great’s empire was being parcelled out among his heirs. Seleucos I Nicator drew the straw for Mesopotamia and Northern Syria. (The city’s name, Europos comes from his birthplace in Macedonia, and ‘Dura’ means fortress in Old Semitic). Its early years were as a fortress guarding the river route to Lower Mesopotamia, and the planned city didn’t get started until the mid second century BCE. Dura became the focus of the military colonies across the region, but it never seems to have lived up to its plans. Even during the Roman era, the great stone walls were still mud brick from halfway up.

Dura was basically a frontier town, controlling the river, local shipping, the east/west border, and several trade routes. Control of the city, though, was a moveable feast; it passed from Selucid control, to the Romans and the Parthians, and eventually fell to the Sassanians, who destroyed it in 256.

The date of the fall of the city is known with such certainty, because some of the final fights—hand-to-hand combat between the Roman troops and the invaders—took place shortly after payday. One of the massive defensive towers had been mined from each side. The mines collapsed and the soldiers were buried. Their skeletons were unearthed in the twentieth century, surrounded by the coins from their pockets. The most recently minted coins gave their year.

With control being passed back and forth, and traders coming through the city a town of very mixed influences—the buildings show traces of all sorts of design traditions, and there was a full complement of religions, with pagan era temples to the Roman gods Zeus and Artemis, more temples for some of the Palmyrene pantheon, a synagogue, a Christian chapel a converted house (the earliest known centre of this new cult in Syria), and a Mithraeum, for the favourite Persian-originated cult of the Roman legions.

The synagogue walls were the first things from Dura that I saw, the year before, in the museum in Damascus. When the seventeen-century-old building was unearthed in the 1930s, from the piled up sands that had been used to protect the city against mining, it revealed something never seen before. The walls were entirely covered with frescoes: bright, strong, clear paintings in the local style of scenes from the Old Testament, breaking all the rules by being full to bursting with representations of the human figure.

+ + + + +

There was a strong wind bashing into me from the side, making my skin sting with flying grit. I sang ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary’ very badly, and very loudly; there was no one around to run away in protest at the aural torture. I put my head down, reading some notes about the city, and cracked on. It worked. Each time I looked up, the city had taken a jump closer, and the walls were looking bigger and bigger. You can see them for miles around—there’s nothing to block the view, but it’s only when you get up close that you have any conception of the true scale. The main wall was huge: eight hundred metres along the outside face, punctuated with heavy defensive towers.

Even though it was barely past eight in the morning, the sun was starting to get very hot, and there was little shade, even inside the city. A man, in a thick nylon anorak and a rather more traditional head scarf scrambled down the rough steps by the Palmyra gate, from the old guardhouse, and relieved me of the standard 300 Syrian Pound entrance fee. There was some fussing and searching, as he went through the panniers on his beaten up motorbike to find a date stamp that didn’t work until he licked the end to moisten the number. He gave me a green stained smile and waved me through the entrance.

Once you’re through the walls, the site spreads another half kilometre in front of you, a vast jumble of excavated foundations, and low stone walls. The ground is rough with broken stones and dry tufts of grass and thistles, but you can still see the gridlines of streets and clusters of buildings. With the lack of shade, colour seems to have drained out of the place. But the mud bricks are embedded with mica, which flashes and sparkles in the sun. It seems an oddly whimsical decoration for a military stronghold.

I followed the line of the main walls north first of all, ducking through low doorways to find interlocking chambers, inside the walls but open to the sky, and poked about in the khan, and the temples in the corner. It was only when I edged past the corner that I got an idea of the true scale of the defences. There might be a bloody great wall, but there was also a deep wadi, with steep sides, and a huge drop down to the bright blue-green of the far-below ribbon of the Euphrates River. There’s a similar line of natural defences on the Southern edge, with the river running along the East.

For all the time I’d spent looking at a plan of the site, I’d forgotten that it sat above the river like this. The sight of the water came as a delicious surprise. I continued to walk around the edges of the fortress, trying to keep the river in view as I clambered around the commander’s palace and through the other side. I sat a while, swigging tepid bottled water, enjoying the breeze, and gazing down across the river.

It’s clear where the flood plain lies—there’s an abundance of greenery, of domestic buildings, of cultivation. There are neat strips of farming; from a vantage point up on this ridge, you can see the ant-sized people moving around in their fields. Outside, on the plain in front of the fortress, was nothing at all, not a blade of grass, but on the other side of the river every inch of the fertile earth was being used. I could hear the beds of reeds moving in the wind and, somewhere in the distance, a donkey was complaining. It’s impossible to avoid seeing how some of the oldest civilisations grew up here, along these generous rivers that unloaded rich silt into the soil each year.

+ + + + +

Inside Dura, a couple of hundred metres away was a solid, fairly high wall. I could see two people walking along the ridge of it, and decided to go and check it out, see if I had imagined them.

Walking closer, I burst out laughing when the optical illusion broke. Below me, the earth angled down steeply, leading to another wadi. Down there at river level was a huge citadel. Huge. A monster of a castle. Tall enough to rise to the level of the main city. From where I’d stood before, only the topmost few feet had been visible.

I followed a narrow, well-beaten track down the slope, and then got tangled in false starts and trickery. There were faint trails in different directions, which would end abruptly over a chasm of excavations, or be covered in broken glass too widely strewn to leap over.

I was already too hot, but I couldn’t get this far and then turn back. I could already imagine the conversation I’d have with Snarl:

“So, what did you do when you went to Dura Europos?”
“Me? Oh, I pottered about for a while, saw a big damn citadel, and decided to ignore it and went home.”
“You lazy sod.”

Muttering rude words, I scrambled up into the castle, and climbed up anything and everything that looked even halfway climbable. There was no breeze inside these closer walls, so the heat was rather more obvious. I slithered down into a small patch of shade, and contemplated a nap. I settled for another guzzle of water, and carried on across the city. For the next few hours I hopped up and down onto walls, to get into old houses and shops and temples. I picked up fragments to steal, and became fascinated by the way that mica flakes apart—it was right back to chemistry O level, and lessons about crystalline structures—and then felt guilty, and dropped them again.

This place didn’t get under my skin like Mari had. It was impressive. The scale was stupendous, and everything was up above ground, rather than dug down through layers of time, but, there was less pleasure in the exploration.

Back at the entrance, where everything was shadowy and relatively cool, I was joined by the gatekeeper. He fussed over me sitting on the stones, and insisted on finding me something more appropriate to sit on. I wasn’t over keen on sitting on his rather nasty anorak, though. He rolled me cigarettes, traded for the Winstons I was smoking. It was getting harder and harder to find American cigarettes in Syria. The street sellers, who transported cheap smokes in from Lebanon were too cross with the US, for adding Syria to the list of ‘the axis of Evil’. Even smugglers have national pride, but their unilateral boycott of goods meant I’d been struggling to find a brand I liked. The tiny Iranian cigarettes we’d bought last time had put me off—they were liquid with tar, and still rougher than five o’clock shadow.

From the start, though, he was just a little bit too friendly. After the “married, how many babies, no babies, have you seen a doctor” he beamed at me, and offered to make some Syrian babies with me. I pretended not to understand, showed him my collection of pictures of my husband, and asked him about his wife.

“Very, very expensive to have a wife. Costs so much money to be married. First, the presents, the wedding, the clothes. Then, you have to buy all the things for your house, for your madam. Too much money for me.”

Oops. He didn’t have a wife.

I started to look at my watch. He asked where I was going next. I talked about visiting Deir ez Zur, going on to Raqqa and Resafeh.

“But you must sleep here, instead! You can stay in the citadel. No money. For free! Very cheap price, huh? Sleep in the castle. Look at the stars. Or, if that’s not good, come and stay in my house, down by the wadi.”

No, he still didn’t have a wife. Damn. And he didn’t live with his family.

It would have been marvellous to sleep in the citadel next to the river, curled up against ancient walls. It would almost certainly have been better than whichever grubby hotel I’d be ending up in. But, I couldn’t. Not just me, and the anoraked gatekeeper, alone in a deserted city. Nope.

“Perhaps next time, when I return to Syria with my husband.”

I’d never heard the words ‘Insh’Allah’ said so despondently.

+ + + + +

There was a minibus parked outside, though I’d not seen anyone around apart from the distant figures on the citadel wall. It was pushing one o’clock, and the light was glaringly bright. Dozens of dust-coloured crickets scattered, with every footstep as I marched back to the main road. My skin felt like tissue paper, and my pack was heavier than any bag weighing twenty pounds has any right to be. There were shimmering patches of mirage-light where the highway should be. And then, bliss, there was a mad honking right behind me. The minibus swerved, I jumped out of the way, the driver waved to me, and yelled, ‘Deir? You want to go to Deir?’

‘Na’am! Yes! Shukran!’
‘Itfaddali! Here you are! In! In!’

I swung up through the open door, and came face to face with three very smart, very unamused French people.
The driver welcomed me, his six-year-old son waved, and the French people glowered.
‘OK to take this lady with us? Yes? OK!’
‘Er…’ said the senior Frenchman.
‘That’s so kind of you,’ I said, before he could say it wasn’t OK. We were already moving though, and getting out again could have been messy.

So, I rode back to Deir, perched in the jump seat behind the driver, listening to Arabic covers of Motown tunes, and chatting to the kid. The French family didn’t talk to me, except to say they had hired the bus for a couple of days, and were going to Palmyra. I started to enthuse about Palmyra, in really lousy French, but their perfectly shaped noses were already back in the Michelin guide.

There were small villages all the way along the road. Everything looked lush, and abundant with growth. The houses were surrounded by sunflowers and hollyhocks, or had ripe corn growing right up to the front door. Cows ambled around, looking fat. Donkeys ambled down the middle of the road, loaded with bundles, most with two girls sitting on their back. The irrigation channels, which ended in deep pools, were full of splashing, squawking children larking about like it was the best summer holiday yet invented. The driver honked with delight as he bullied the donkeys out of the road, swerved around the pothole craters, or overtook trucks of sheep.

They dropped me near the centre of the town, by the river, and I went to find my hotel.


posted at 9:53 PM

Mari: the seven sisters
From my spot on the High Terrace, I could see nobody at all. If I walked about ten miles east, I’d be in Iraq. I knew that there were scatterings of farms and villages around—I’d heard a tractor about an hour earlier—but I felt like the country was entirely empty. This dusty, abandoned city felt like the edge of the world. I’m comfortable with no company but my own, and happy to spend days in silence, but right then, among the ghosts in the trenches, I was lonely.

There was a flood of questions battering at my brain—why am I here? What is the point of sitting on a bus for hours to walk around a fallen down city, all on my own, in the blazing sun? What on earth am I doing? Why am I spending my time poking about in forgotten relics, when I could, should, be making fabulous friendships and having involved conversations? Shouldn’t I just be at home, with Snarl? But the answers were louder than the questions.

Why come here? Easy. Because I can come here.

Because I can see what came before, see how the world grew, see traces of the empires that rose and fell, and left glimpses of lost worlds behind. Because it is full of wonders and I get to claim them as my own, because I’ve seen them. Because it is a jigsaw puzzle. Because I have to get from here to there and show myself that I am bold and brave and that it’s all very easy, much easier than I’d ever have imagined before trying, and because people are kind and open and welcoming. Because I can see a fox in the temple, and chase crickets through the palace. Because I can walk, and so I must. Because travel is now such an easy luxury that it seems a terrible waste to ignore the opportunity. Because, however much you read and how many films you see, nothing will ever beat being there, and seeing it all for yourself. And I want to, oh, how I want to see it all and show it to other people with words and help stir up that itch to explore.

The answers are so screamingly obvious that I was embarrassed by the doubts, even though the reassurances sound so entirely cheesy.

But did I wish that Snarl were with me? Hell, yes. Not because it’s easier that way, or less hassle, but because out ways of seeing nudge together. They overlap and push forwards. Because we are good at spinning stories together. Because he takes the piss out of me when I get all wifty-wafty and swoonsome. Because we urge each other along, and it’s much harder to be lazy when he’s raring to go out and see, see everything.

I was out of water, the sun was glowing its last over the horizon, all this introspection was making me queasy, and my eyes were entirely full. It was time to head over the back to the mission house, make some polite small talk, and get an early night.

As I came back over the low ridge, though, a little girl in a bright pink shirt and flowery long skirt came skipping towards me, and then broke into a run. She came to an abrupt halt, bang in front of me, thrust out her hand with great formality, and collapsed in giggles when I shook it. She corrected me, by holding my hand tightly, and swinging our arms we marched back towards the houses. As we came into sight of the family, two other kids came out to join us, in a clamour of introductions, questions, and laughter. There was some mild squabbling about who got to hold my hand, who got to carry my bag, and who got a piggyback ride. Now they knew my name, they started to weave it into a shouty, tuneless, giddy song. The only words I could pick out were ‘Kate’ and ‘mahaba’, but I took it for granted that it was a nice song.

Mamma was feeding the three cows, and the pretty brown calf, with shockingly green bundles of alfalfa, pulling out handfuls from loose canvas wrappings, and strewing them around. A teenage daughter had just finished the milking--with one frothing basin on her head, and another in her arms, there was a narrowly averted disaster as she tried to nod and wave hello to the grubby foreigner.

The young ambassador tugged at my hand, pulling me towards a pair of brick ovens—smooth-walled hollows, inside a large brick-built platform, glowing with coals—and announced, ‘bread!’ She patted her hands together, flipped them over, patted again, ‘bread! I smiled at her big sister, who was peeling fresh rounds of bread from the walls of the oven. The smallest, with a mad tangle of curly hair, had started to use me as a climbing frame—pulling out my hand, and then walking up my legs, until she was nose to nose with me. I swung her around, and deposited her on the ground. Bad move. This was too much fun, and had to be repeated, again, and again as I talked to the baker. She was pink in the face from the heat of the fire, and trying to shoo the swarms of children away from me. This became another game, a round of grandmother’s footsteps, with wild shrieking and laughing, and hammy acting of all innocence.

Sister Baker was a charming mixture of incredible shyness, and huge mischief. She had fragments of multiple languages, and we found a fairly comfortable mixture of English and French, well, enough to get by. She taught me more Arabic than I’d learned before, but I’d forgotten half of it by the morning. (If I had three wishes, from a trapped goblin, or a fairy godmother, an aptitude for learning languages would be the first.) As the girls dug through my bag, and played with my umbrella, and danced around in circles, we got through the preliminaries of home and travel and family. She ripped off pieces of steaming hot bread for me to try, and ran through the ‘husband? Married? How many babies? That many years and no babies!’ routine, but, before I can launch into my white lies she’s giggling, and tickling the tiniest girl (who is currently sitting on my hip anyway).

“Take this one. You be her Mamma.”
“OK! She’ll do. Can I have another, too?”
“No, only this one. Because she is too naughty for us to keep!”
She translates for the gorgeous kid, who looks horrified, then intrigued, and then announces that yes, she would please like an English Mamma, but not today. She planted a kiss on my cheek, jumped down, and ran away, cackling, to pester the calf.

“I think you only get to borrow her,” said Sister Baker. “She is a little crazy anyway. I don’t think you’d keep her long. She would drive you crazy too.” She tapped her forehead, and pulled faces. It seems that this girl, I think the oldest of the daughters, was the official sensible one, herding the little ones around. Every time I saw her, she was wiping a face, or straightening hair, or taking sharp knives away from the youngest three. Eleven children in the family, stretching from knee high to grown up. As far as I could work things out, there were two mothers for this brood, but perhaps one was a mother-in-law instead because there was quite a large age gap. Not that this mattered. The whole crew was incredibly welcoming, and it was a real pleasure to be surrounded by talkative women.

As it got dark, the television was put on, and I was dragged inside so that I could watch their favourite soap. Eight of us clustered around the small screen. Flickery with static, and in rapid-fire Arabic, I couldn’t work out what was going on, but I had an enthusiastic commentary from the two middle girls.

‘This one loves this man, but his mother thinks she is bad. Oh. This man is married to this woman, but she hates his other wife. She, she is telling her mother about the bad woman. Here is Mamma! No! She is very upset now. That is because her brother is in prison now. Look. Oh, she is very beautiful.”

I nodded and ummed and ahhed and said “oh, really”, but I was tangled in plot and characters within five minutes. But I had no intention of moving away, or stopping watching. The youngest children were sprawled over me: one, curled up asleep on my lap, a second with her head on my shoulder, the third had her arm hooked through mine, so she could play with my bracelets. Two young boys edged out and sat at the table, peering at me a little dubiously.

I batted at the flies and admired the pictures of the Assads, father and son, on the wooden wall. Sister Baker smiled, dreamily, when she saw where I was looking. “He is so handsome, so beautiful. Do you love your president?” Somehow, I can’t imagine Tony Blair inspiring such a teenage crush.

As the soap ended, and conversation was reaching the end of our vocabulary, I pulled out some origami paper, and started folding cranes, peacocks, flowers and frogs, letting the kids choose which colour I should use next. Within a few minutes, three very serious under-tens were folding, carefully, amazed at the easy magic. The older sisters sat back, watching, congratulating me on the quiet concentration of their rabble.

As we folded paper, and compared our creations, not thinking, I drank glass after glass of water. I was so dehydrated my lips were cracking when I laughed. The water was cold and sweet, so I downed about three pints of the stuff.

(Six months later, I’m still ill. Oh well. I’d not exchange that evening for anything.)

After we’d eaten—a dozen of us together at the long, low table, digging into rich omelette, icy-cold yoghurt, tomatoes and cucumbers, with torn off strips of the new bread—the power crashed, and so we moved outside. Or rather, I was ushered outside to the courtyard, where carpets and cushions had been spread across the earth to make an outside sitting room, and the girls were packed off to bed.

I was joined by the older boys, and the young man who I’d met first off, who spoke very little, but watched me as I smoked cigarettes, and smiled. I probably looked like the village idiot—glowing with happiness, good food, and glorious company. Lights swung across the courtyard as people drove their trucks home from the fields. Three tall men in long gowns appeared from along a path, were greeted and seated. They nodded politely to me, accepted a cigarette each, but there was business going on, and I was less interesting than that.

I leaned back on the cushions and looked up at the sky. There was no breeze, no noise but the occasional volley of dog barks and the background murmuring of the conversation around me. The moon was low and fat and full, making the whole world silver. An owl flew low over me, so close that I felt the stirring of the air from his wings. I was drowsy and drifting, content.

Perhaps it had been nothing spectacular, just a smooth-flowing domestic evening. They were very polite, to being with, but within half an hour of joining them in the evening, there was a tangle of teasing and laughter. There was no ceremony, and no formality, beyond the astonishing hospitality of the Syrian people. I was just a temporary addition to their home, surrounded by seven sisters. It was entirely lovely. I retired to bed before the magic broke.


posted at 7:10 PM

demob happy
yesterday, I was officially made redundant. I'd known for two weeks that I was going to be laid off, but now I am an official member of the great unwashed. First thing I'm doing, obviously, is planning some travel with this wodge of cash. Then I'll panic about not having a job.

Still sick, still knocked sideways by pain and tiredness, but I've reached the point where I'm so entirely bored of this game that I'm attempting the Lawrence of Arabia approach: 'the trick is to not mind that it hurts'. And so, while scouring atlases and guidebooks, I'm dusting off the notebooks from Syria, and trying to get that all written up before booking tickets to whichever place is next. So, after a six month gap, more words...


posted at 1:37 PM

Mari: guidebooks, and a pinch of salt
I have a set of recurring nightmares about travel. I’m in an airport, or on my way to an airport, and, if I’ve not left my passport or tickets or money at home, I have to go somewhere new for the first time, and it’s a place I know nothing about. Somehow, I have to find out something about this place before I get there. The airport bookshops have no guides, no maps—they’ve never heard of this country. It’s often a made-up country, or a one-horse town deep in an obscure African region, but that’s dreaming for you. I don’t know what currency is used, what language is spoken there, or what the cultural norms are. I tend to wake up in a cold sweat of panic.

Many travellers have an incredibly easygoing approach to their destinations--turn up in a country and play it by ear, or, open a guidebook for the first time as they cross the border. Or they’ll pitch up in one town, and ask other travellers about the highlights of their trip, the best deals on hotels, and about which cafes are notoriously awful. But, when I see a posting on Lonely Planet’s Thorntree board, along the lines of “Hi, next week I’m off to Madagascar for a month’s holiday. Please can someone tell me anything about it, and what’s worth seeing there” I get twitchy.

Perhaps I spent too many years in the Brownies, and had the ‘be prepared’ credo knocked in to me so deeply, I feel all at sea in ignorance. Before I travel anywhere, I like to do my homework. I’ll read through a pile of guidebooks, history books, old travel books and local novels. I’ll tack large maps to the wall, and stand in front of them, tracing possible routes and trying to picture the land. I’ll poke away endlessly at Google to find credible sites about the country, trying to find out about places which aren’t on the obvious top five must see things.

I like magical mystery tours, but I prefer having some knowledge about the things I might see, the places I might go. The research is part of my pleasure of travelling. By immersing myself in information, I can extend the journey for several weeks before I walk out of the front door, tickets in hand. And once I’m there, I get more out of the journey if I know what I’m looking at, with some of the history, some of the stories, some of the background of the place.

I don’t believe, can’t believe, that background knowledge takes away the magic of being there. Petra was no less magical for knowing something about the Nabateans, Jean-Louis Buckhardt and Agatha Christie’s dreadful “Appointment with Death.”

It’s not just about getting some idea of the practicalities—the ‘can I get there from here?’ or, ‘what’s a reasonable amount to pay for three days in the desert on a camel trek?’ details—but that’s where the regular guidebooks are the strongest.

Footprint and Lonely Planet have pointed me to fabulously cheap and clean hotels, great food, and otherwise hidden microbus stations. They’ve prevented me being stitched up on taxi fares, or stuck in a place with no public transport on Tuesdays. I am, however, dubious of those who use them as if they are the infallible words of Travel Gods.

I have learnt to be particularly wary of guidebook entries that say “nothing to see here, move along”, or “only of interest to the specialist, the archaeologist or the perversely determined”. I’ll take their word, mostly, on logistics, but I won’t buy their dismissals of potentially interesting places.

I’m always worried that I’ll miss out on something really spectacular.
If I’d believed the guidebooks, I’d have skipped Ain Dara, and never gone to Mari.

+ + + + +

I headed out of Palmyra early in the morning. After a few frustrating rounds of ‘is there a bus to Abu Kemal?’ with a scarily wall-eyed man in a concrete box, I ended up a couple of kilometres outside the town, sitting on my backpack, waiting for the bus to Deir ez Zur. We hadn’t made it across to the Eastern side of Syria on the previous trip, so this time I was ignoring the ‘nothing but a field of trenches’ advice and going to Mari. I’d fallen in love with the fat-bellied alabaster statues of priests and worshippers and kings. Their smooth foreheads, extravagant eyeliner and splendid feathered skirts had caught at some annoying corner of my imagination. I wanted to go and see where they came from, even if all the treasures were safely behind glass in Damascus and Aleppo.

The bus was much like any other in Syria—not quite as air conditioned as you’d hope it would be, full, but not over-flowing, a round of chilled water and boiled sweets, and the blasting of Egyptian movies on a small screen above the driver. This one riveted me—it was a tale of a man who looked like a frog, and his crazy girlfriend, with touching scenes from asylum balconies, fistfights with doctors, and full lightning crack electroshock treatments, as frogboy wept and howled. It was a strange enough story to begin with, but the bad shooting made it trippily surreal: the contrast was off, most of it was over exposed, and all the white coats, hospital walls, and mad people’s gowns vanished in the glare. Dark, disembodied heads, and wildly waving hands floated across a bright, white screen. It was acted with all the subtlety of open-air theatre in a howling gale. Outside the curtained windows, everything was as sun-bleached as the movie.

Two hundred and twenty kilometres later, at Deir, I changed to a microbus heading out another hundred to Abu Kemal, went through the inevitable confusion about the fare, with money passed back and forth across three rows of sardine-crammed passengers, and waited for the off.

I was wedged against a student—going home to see her family in a village on the way. She was studying maths at the university, and, despite her excruciating shyness, was very keen to practice her English on me. With the rattling and banging of the meecro, and the thunder of army trucks going past, it was hard to hear her whispers, and it took me a while to cotton on to the fact that she had a few questions leaned by rote, but couldn’t understand my answers. No matter, there was a lot of smiling. But when she took my hand and whispered ‘I will be very happy to sleep with you,” I was flummoxed.

“To speak with me?” I said as clearly and slowly as possible.
“Yes! I am very much happy to sleep English.”

For the next hour or so, I was sat on by a tiny, robe-wrapped grandmother, clutching a miniscule newborn baby—still powdery and wrinkled from birth—and shouting endlessly at her three hapless daughters. The old lady shared long, dry cigarettes with me, and laughed forever when I failed to understand her request for water. (Note to less clueless travellers: someone holding their hand up—as if thumbing their nose, but a little south, with the thumb pointing to the lips--should result in you passing over your water bottle, not staring blankly.)

+ + + + +

I tumbled out of the bus, climbing inelegantly over two families, and almost braining someone with my camera, and was waved off with a whole chorus of ma’a salamas, by a rickety sign painted with the water goddess pointing towards Tell Hariri. It was shockingly hot, almost noon, and the kilometre or so to the site seemed particularly long and bumpy. I slogged along, wondering what the hell I was doing at the arse-end of nowhere, narrowly avoided tripping over a fat chicken, and collapsed in a sweaty heap in a courtyard, cursing as I realised I’d left my paper fan on the bus.

Two small heads poked out of a door. There was a whispered conference, and then some shouting. Within moments, a sleepy young man in a long, pale djellabah was ushering me to a cushioned bench in a tree-branched room, and offering me tea. Yawning, he tested my Arabic, my creaky French, and settled on English as the best bet. He was a little surprised to see a tourist today, but, still, have some tea, sit a while. Yes, of course he could sell me a ticket, but, was I sure?

“I have come all the way from Palmyra to see Mari,” I said, a little defensively.
“Ah, you are an archaeologist!”
“No, just a tourist.”
“And you want a ticket?”
“Uh huh.”
“Ah, you are a student! Of course!”
“No, just a tourist.”
He went through the mahabas and welcomes again, to cover his confusion, shrugged, and offered me more tea, told me I smoked too much, and said that it was far, far too hot to go and walk around now. All his family was asleep. What else should you do at such a time of day?

I explained that I thought I was just being useless, finding it so hot. He laughed, and pointed at a thermometer. Forty degrees. No wonder I was feeling sorry for myself.

When he found out that I was planning to go on to Abu Kemal that night, he was appalled. “It’s no good there, with filthy hotel, you mustn’t go there. A very bad place! Dirty!”

I shrugged, and pointed out that it was a long way back to Deir.
“But you must stay here instead!” He waved towards a three-storey building across the courtyard, “at the mission house. No archaeologists here now. They’ll come after summer. Stay here.”

He watched me wilting over my tea, fanning myself with the photocopied brochure about the site, “sleep now, I think. Siesta. Visit when the sun goes down.” He took my bottle of water from my hands—“this is better”—and popped it into the freezer.

And so I napped in a hot room, on a flowered counterpane, under a dusty medicine cabinet, exhausted from nothing more strenuous than a couple of bus rides. When I woke up at around three thirty, I charged outside, worried that I’d have too little time to explore before dark. My water was frozen to slush, my camera was loaded, and I was raring to go.

+ + + + +

It was still sodding hot. By the time I’d wound around the path, heading towards the pale canopy over some of the diggings, I was already regretting my rush. My skin smarted with the heat, and I broke into a sweat, dropped back to half-speed and smacked myself, yet again, for only owning black clothes. It was still so hot that just an hour later, sitting on the low, dusty mound that was once a ziggurat to get my bearings and look down on the temple of the lions, the remains of my water were as warm as half-drunk tea, and my skin was caked with the fine, grey earth of the city.

When I first arrived, I had a terrible sinking feeling as I looked across the site. It was almost entirely lacking in colour: everything was a pale greyish-brown, and, damn it, it did look remarkably like a field full of World War I trenches. I sat down, and grouched for a while, casting around for a starting point. There were low bulges across the mound, and deep cuts of excavations. I couldn’t see what differentiated a crumbling, dusty wall from the desiccated earth around it. How could anyone digging tell the difference? Perhaps they just dug where they felt there might have been a room, cutting away neat straight lines until everyone was convinced there was a city there, once.

But sit still. And look. Let your eyes focus on the shapes, first, and then get up and walk closer. Walk along, following a wall, and stare at the texture. Let your eyes adjust, as if to darkness, and you can see the difference between the raw earth, and the industry of long-dead human hands. Look at the edges, and the corners, and how the bricks were joined together. Look at the structure, at the floors, and the steps. Look at the water pipes, at the daises, and the doorways. It shudders into focus, and it is overwhelming. There is a rush of understanding, as you press your back against the wall of a palace that was ancient when Jesus was wandering around, fiddling with loaves and fishes. You are walking between rooms that were built five thousand years ago. Someone lived here. Someone prayed here. Someone cooked here, and slept, and made love, and laughed. And all of a sudden, the edges of time fold together.

Mari is so fragile. As soon as it is excavated, it is vulnerable. Rain melts it. The wind blows it away. This is unbaked earth, and by discovering it, we are destroying it. UNESCO has decided that it should be unearthed, mapped, documented, and then left to the elements. And once one part is mapped, it must be destroyed to reach the older layers below. Only one small section, part of the palace of Zimri-Lim, the last king of Mari, is covered. The palace predates him, being built over several centuries before his reign, but he was the last ruler before the city fell to the Babylonian, Hammurabi, in 1760 BCE, and was destroyed. It was only rediscovered in 1933, and has yielded up amazing secrets from its dust—seventeen thousand cuneiform tablets, hundreds of statues and votive offerings, wall paintings, thrones, domestic odds and ends.

I tucked the map into my pocket, and walked slowly through the maze of buildings and courtyards under the canopy, following the paths as they dropped lower, deeper and deeper back in time. Sparrows and finches hopped around overhead, their frantic chirping, and the tapping of their claws on the rigid plastic roof echoing through the cavernous space.

I was glad I was without a guide here. I could be as wishy-washy, romantic and full of mystical bullshit as I pleased. I could pace around, talking to myself, whistling, and reciting stories. I could poke around for undiscovered treasures, and be satisfied with shiny pebbles when, unsurprisingly, I didn’t trip over alabaster statues, glazed bowls, or another library of tablets.

I covered acres of the site, drifting around, stepping carefully, and fretting when my steps sent another shower of dust from what was once the upper edge of a wall. I had a heffalump hunt moment when I circled around in the sacred enclosure and found my own footsteps again. Inside and out, I tried to map the city in my own head, trying to work out which were regular houses, which were temples, before checking against the diagrams and maps. I walked around heaps of broken pottery—smooth, fat-bodied jars—and along walkways between baked-brick water tanks.

The sun was sliding down lower, stretching shadows and deepening the dug away centuries. I was crouching on a rock, staring across the Temple of Ishtar, when my gaze was met by that of a fox. Not moving, just watching, as pale and dusty as the earth, he twisted his huge ears around, listening to me, before trotting along a narrow parapet and vanishing into the tangle of old living quarters. He was the only company I had that afternoon, apart from the iridescent green bee-eaters, the chattering sparrows, the stone-coloured lizards who scattered away from my feet, and the quiet ghosts of the city.

I watched the sunset from the High Mound, above a cluster of temples, and though the wind was still warm, I was shivering. There was something deeply shocking about this place. It was a living city, not just a set of magnificent tombs built to outlast death.


posted at 1:38 PM

pecked by crows, and pink in the face
Three months on, and still sick. Tedious, no? It's still rather a mystery. It's not gallstones, it's not an exploded bile duct, it still might be parasites, there's something dodgy going on with my liver. I've been up and down with pain, stuffed to the gills with a concoction of drugs which makes pharmacists wince. I've been in a slow blur for months, worn out by a small totter to the end of the garden and back, to pick a pear, or peer at the fish. Summer came and went in a straggle of bright long days, drowned now in fallen leaves (and fallen trees, knocked flat by the huge weekend winds.) I'm a third of a year older, and nothing's happened. I've read some books, I've slept a lot, I've watched the colour of the light change outside the bedroom window.

I've learned a few new origami tricks. I've consulted with cats. I've been to the pub (once). I've seen the swifts leave, the rooks come back, and the geese arrive and go in long straggling v-shaped skeins. I've bought a victorian stuffed woodcock which leers from the mantelpiece. I've lost 20 pounds. I built a new website for snarl and I'm still working on one for someone else. I've had two stays in hospitals, and some very nice flowers. I've been left in helpless giggles by old ladies snoring, and left speechless with anger by the way that nurses are treated. I've developed a full-blown dependency on Radio4 and an allergy to morphine. I've been bored silly by this waste of days and weeks. I've not written at all. My concentration drifts like badly made paper boats on a storm-fat stream.

Yesterday, I was back in hospital, having what is delicately known as a procedure. I had a dozen needles or so pushed into my back, searching out nerves, to deaden them and kill them with anaesthetic and steriods, in some attempt to give me a break from this pain. Pain which sometimes I think I have imagined, sometimes I am sure is payback for a really rotten thing I did once in an earlier life. It won't solve the problem of the cause, only the symptoms, if I am lucky. But I'd give almost anything for a break from this pain. Sometimes it's a low grumble, sometimes it leaves me curled up and crying, even through the haze of drugs. So I'm hoping this will work. But when I woke up, and breathed in, all i could think was that I had had by ribs kicked in by a gang of Goths in pointy-toed boots, or pecked by a flock of crows. Today, I've not budged from bed at all, except to wander downstairs in my pyjamas and whine for more coffee, and I am as bright pink and flushed and gasping as I'd be after three hours digging, or a whole night of boozing and dancing on top of a cold hill.


posted at 8:08 PM

continued absence
Still sick. Still unable to string words together coherently. All fuddled with medications and pain and tiredness. I was in hospital. Now I'm out. Still don't know what the hell is causing this. Iffy gallbladder. Mystery bug. Something up with my liver. Who knows. I'm in limbo. Just taking the drugs, dozing as much as I can. And waiting for more tests. No words. I miss words. I'll be back on this planet soon, I hope. I'm bored of this.


posted at 7:12 PM