The Oldest Cities of the World

Right after crossing the land border to Syria, our driver stopped by a gas station to fill up gas.  It was a ghetto looking gas station and it had a ghetto looking slurpee machine with three colours – florescent orange, blinding yellow, deadly purple.  Just as I was thinking ‘eew gross!’ our nice driver opened up Eug’s door with one of each in his hands and gestured Eug to choose.  Eug politely took the two of the less deadly looking ones and our driver gestured us to taste them.  We reluctantly took a small sip each and nodded until he gave a satisfying smile and continued driving towards Aleppo.  For the rest of the car ride, we were thinking of ways to get rid of these fatal liquids without him noticing.  It was only our first day in Syria and neither of us wanted to risk the chance of getting traveler’s diarrhoea.  We ended up finishing the small bottle of water we had in our bag so we could pour the slurpees into the empty bottle.  But because of the ice, Eug couldn’t pour it directly into the water bottle, so he ended up using the slurpee straw to transfer the slush into the bottle one straw-full at a time using his index finger to retain and release.  At the same time he was pretending to be enjoying the border town scenery too.  It took a good half an hour but his mad straw skills saved our stomach.

Syria isn’t a big country.  Our itinerary was to start with Aleppo in the North, followed by a picturesque train ride to a coast town Lattakia, then the famous water wheel town Hama, next the desert town Palmyra, and we were to end in the capital Damascus.  All cities were within 3 hours drive of each other.

Aleppo is one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world.  The main sights in the city that we visited were the Citadel, the Old City, and the Christian Quarter.  We made the Christian district of Al-Jdeida our base for three days.  It’s a much quieter neighbourhood than the hustling and bustling souq of the Old City, and this charming cobbled area has a few age-old townhouses being converted into beautiful boutique hotels.  The Citadel sits atop a huge mound east of the Old City, it was quite an enjoyable walk inside the citadel after having a fit and FPH to Eug right before that.  We also took a day tour outside Aleppo to visit the Basilica of St. Simeon (Qala’at Samaan).  He built a pillar to preach from, and kept making it higher and higher so people couldn’t touch him, and at night he would chain himself to it so that he wouldn’t fall off the pillar in his sleep.  Quite a peculiar guy if you ask me.  After the Basilica we went to the Dead Cities of Al-Bara and Serjilla.  These are ancient deserted ghost towns that still have some remaining ruins.  Even though Al-Bara is supposed to be the most extensive of the Dead Cities, we found Serjilla to be more interesting.  It has been deserted for about 15 centuries but the buildings’ stone facades are remarkably well preserved.  We also met some nice young Syrian guys who were just having a picnic under one of the columns.  They immediately invited us to join them for lunch when we walked by and after we gestured ‘we are full’ by patting our stomach, they insisted for us to have something to drink by shoving 2 full cups of Sprite into our hands.  Since we didn’t speak Arabic and they didn’t speak English, it was one of the longest Sprite drinking moments ever, until eventually one of them bent down and picked up a dried weed and split it in half and asked Eug to teach him how to use chopsticks.  He was quite talented and was able to pick up an olive after 10 seconds of practicing.

After Aleppo, we headed towards the coast to Lattakia.  Lonely Planet says it has some fine beaches so we decided to relax there for a few days.  It turned out to be a busy port town with high cranes and countless shipping containers so we ended up spending only one night and we took off the next day to Hama.

Besides seeing the water wheels in Hama, many tourists stay in Hama to visit the impressive Roman ruins of Apamea and Crac Des Chevaliers, which TE Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) simply called ‘the finest castle of the world’.  We enjoyed both very much, especially the castle.  It’s a Crusader fortress in Syria.  We’ve visited a few castles on this trip already and this one is definitely our favourite so far.

We then went east towards Palmyra (Tadmor in Arabic), the Bride of the Desert (the picture above).  In ancient times it was a vital caravan city for travelers crossing Syria.  Now the sandstone ruins of the city are one of the premier ancient sites in the Middle East.  We started our visit with the temple of Ba’al, and then walked along a colonnaded street which led to the rest of the ancient city.  We didn’t get to see the theatre since there was a movie being filmed at the time.  It was quite funny to see scrawny teenaged Syrian gladiator extras all lined up on top of a small theatre.  We also went up to the citadel to get a panoramic view of the city around sunset.  It was quite amazing how we could actually picture the ancient city from its remains.

We’ve been seeing a lot of great sites so far, but starting in Syria, we met a lot of travelers also traveling the same regions.  So we ended up visiting the sites with them and traveling to different towns together when our itineraries happened to coincide.  It’s been really fun and enjoyable with them!