After passing a Turkish border stop where I accepted the tea on offer from the border guards who were taking target practice at a nearby hill with their pistols, I crossed with a large herd of semi trucks into Syria and went through immigration. It was Friday, which is sort of like Sunday in the West, so the hills around Aleppo were packed with picnicking Aleppine families grilling up kebaps and smoking nargileh wherever a clear patch of green could be found. The tribute to political leaders continues here in the Middle East, and billboards and monuments to Hafez al-Assad and Bashir Al-Assad can be seen everywhere. Below this towering Bashir billboard you can see a family busy unloading their picnic supplies from the car. In addition to the presumably government-financed billboard campaign, individual citizens are doing their part, and I have seen a number of cars decorated with stylized posters of the three male al-Assads (Hafez, Bashir and Basil). Basil was the eldest son of long-standing president Hafez, but died a James Dean death in a high speed automobile accident, which ended up unexpectedly putting London Opthamologist, Bashir, up to the presidential plate after the death of his father. (3/18/05)

It's the land of squiggles and dots, but fortunately for me the signs (for the most part) are also posted in the Latin alphabet. The numbers are also a bit confusing - what looks like a zero to me is an arabic five, and what looks like a seven is an arabic six. It's nice to be back in the Middle East, with all its culinary offerings - felafel, hummus, baba ganug, fatoush, tahini, and other mezze. The traffic seems to operate under the same rules in Syria as it did when I was in Egypt and Jordan, a functional anarchy. Crossing roads is the most difficult part - you have to walk in front of several lanes of speeding traffic and hope they will yield before crushing you - I usually follow a local person. Cycling on the roads is not that much different, however, because the big highways have pretty broad shoulders where I can ride with a protective buffer from the chaos in the lanes to my left. (3/18/05)

The movie posters here for the dubbed Hollywood features are really over the top - and are more a product of the artist's apparently excited imagination than a representation of the film itself. I saw "Just Married" some time ago at home, and I don't recognize anything of what is shown here, except Kutcher's head. (3/18/05)

The Aleppo Souq was without the soft and hard sell hassle of some other bazaars and souqs, and I was pretty much left to myself as I wandered around the maze of covered passages full of shops. There is a certain order to the chaos in that the souq is divided into different areas for different goods, such as spices, cloth, hardware and various other items. I accidentally wandered into the meat section and it was like entering the fifth circle of hell with lamb carcasses hanging from hooks, boiled lamb heads piled on racks and intestines bubbling in buckets over bloody gutters. It was definitely not a walk along the meat counters at home where you are shielded from the butchery. Switching gears for a moment, I cannot believe how cheap everything is here. For example, I handed over two 50 pound notes (less than 2 dollars) at the souq and indicated I wanted as much hummus as that would buy. After the vendor handed me a heaping plastic sack stuffed with a half-kilo of the beige goop and told me that covered the first 50 pound note, I opted to take the other back. A clean hotel room is five dollars, a felafel sandwich is a little over 20 cents - it would be a good place for a starving artist to set up shop. (3/19/05)

It was Syrian Mother's Day when I reached Hama, and all over the downtown merchants were selling strawberries, flowers and cakes. When I was strolling toward the norias, a woman in a full face-covering black burqa caught up to me and peppered me with a rapid-fire series of questions in English, including whether I had called my mother for Mother's Day (I explained it was a different day at home). After reading about the social segregation of men and women in Syria, it was a little unnerving talking to a woman who was so conservatively covered in public. But the real problem was that I don't know how to behave around the burqa - it was embarassingly flustering. It turned out she was studying English and wanted to practice the language. (3/21/05)

Hama was a relaxing city along a bend in the Orontes River, and it's main attraction was a collection of creaking wooden norias at different points along the river. These multi-story waterwheels (which are also featured on the back of the 50 pound note) have been used for centuries to scoop water out of the river and raise it to elevated aquaducts that run to the fields. The noise they make is unusual; I would compare it to a loudly ampliefied constant creaking of a wooden door in a horror movie. I spent a day here doing a lot of nothing in the parks along the banks of the river. (3/21/05)

Syria is a little like what I imagine Cuba to be like in the sense that there is an ususual amount of old American and European automobiles still active on the roads. In any town you can see Peugots, Mercedes, Chevrolets of a vintage that would earn it a historical car plate in the US. The old Jaguar that I saw in Aleppo probably takes the top prize. (3/21/05)

I made a day trip by bike from Hama out to the crumbling remains of the crusader castle, Qasr Ibn Warden, and along the way stopped at a village full of these baked mud beehive houses. Some of them are still in use, but most of them are used for storage. (3/22/05)

The Jebel Ansariyya range stood in between Hama and Krak des Chevaliers, so that turned into a challenging day - and later night - of riding. The route was on secondary roads that were signposted only in Arabic, and even that was haphazard at best. That made things a bit more difficult on a frequently-forking road. Towards evening I was asking directions yet again in a village, and the guy told me to stop in the next town to sleep because at night on the road I would get bitten by wolves. There was no place to stay in the next town, I wanted to make it to Krak des Chevaliers, and I doubted the warnings, so I continued on. It was a near full moon night, so visibility on the road was pretty decent, and I was the only one out travelling at that hour. It was cold enough to require two jackets and the winter mittens, and I could see my breath in the moonlight whenever I stopped for a breather. When I finally approached the valley near my destination I could hear howling along with the strangest animal noises. When I made it to my hotel, the Syrian-American owner (he proudly showed me his U.S. passport) told me that I should not have ridden in the mountains at night because of the hyenas and wolves. I thought he must have been mistaken concerning the hyenas, but I checked my guidebook, and sure enough, Syria has hyenas and wolves. Given the consistency of these warnings, I guess there are a decent number of them in the area. When I was going to sleep in the safety of my hotel room I could hear baying, howling and other foreign canine sounds out in the valley. Incidentally, I also learned from the trusty guidebook an interesting fauna fact: "The majority of the millions of golden hamsters that have been kept worldwide as pets are descended from one single pregnant female that was trapped near Aleppo in 1930." The next morning I visited Krak des Chevaliers, which was pretty impressive - and very much intact. (3/24/05)