Indiana Jones, Eat Your Heart Out

Time limits now pressing, it was time to leave Damascus. There were still two places I wanted to see in Syria–the now-abandoned Roman city of Palmyra, in the middle of the Syrian desert, and the Crusader castle of Krak des Chevaliers. There was a direct bus to Palmyra from Damascus, so I headed there first.

The already-sparse terrain around Damascus faded as we headed north to the bare rock and blowing sand. Every now and then groups of Bedouin on motorcycles would roar past the bus, dusty bikes and Arabian-rug saddles, red-checkered headcloths blowing in the wind. We arrived in Palmyra at a sunset made red with a sky full of dust and sand from the constant wind. I walked from the station through the dry streets of the modern town outside the ruins and found a hotel to drop my bags–it was the off season, so I was able to get a private air-conditioned room with television and fridge for about eight USD per night. Not at all a bad deal, I thought, and headed out to see the ruins at night.

Night falls quickly here, and it was already almost dark. The ruins nearest the town were lit with incandescent light, and glowed golden out across the desert. As I was walking past a restaurant that was more half-shack, half-tent, three men sitting outside called me over and invited me to join them in tea. It turned out they were Bedouin, and Christian–”Bedouin sleeps out in the desert,” one of them said, “Christian,” pointed at me and nodded, “but in the cities many Muslim. Problem … problem.” So it goes, I suppose. They proceeded from these religious distinctions to tell me about what makes the Bedouin strong. Motorcycles, tobacco, the desert, making love to all ten wives in one night. They gave me some local beer and shrugged, pointing to the “3 percent alcohol” label. “Syrian beer,” they said, “no strong.”

I drank tea and talked as much as I could around the language barrier for an hour or two before heading back for the night. The next day dawned bright and clear, already blazingly hot by ten in the morning. I bought myself a traditional Bedouin headcloth for the sun, which worked surprisingly well, and headed out into the desert.

Palmyra was, around and for a few centuries after the birth of Christ, a major center of trade and economy in the area. An aqueduct carried water from the nearby oasis (now a watering hole and seasonal residence for the Bedouin of the desert, as well as a site for several tourist-catering hotels and restaurants when the weather cools down in the fall), allowing an expansive Roman settlement that was a key stop on the silk road carrying goods from the East.

These days it’s been abandoned to the sand. For several hundred years it was inhabited solely by nomads and local peasants–tourism has only seriously begun here in the last century or so. Walking out of the modern town, I crossed the open ground between the oasis and the ruins to meet sand-colored columns and crumbling walls, shimmering in the heat of the day. Palmyra is no small village or single ruin–it’s a sprawling city, and in this heat, I had it entirely to myself. The desert and the ruins and the lack of a single other human within sight leads to a definite feeling of solitude, of the inevitable work of time; good writing experience.

Behind the city proper the bare mountains rise from the desert. In the valley between them is a long double line of tower tombs, some as much as five stories high, with individual stories compose of foot-thick stone floors and twelve-foot ceilings. Only the best-preserved are restricted to access, and I spent the better part of the afternoon exploring them and the smaller (presumably poorer) tomb complexes dug into the stone sides of the mountain. Many of them are virtually untouched–in some of them, you look into the shadowy side passages and see parts of human skeletons looking back.

A middle-aged Bedouin man gave me a ride on his motorcycle from the ruins to one of the admission-fee tombs, where, of course, he had a rug of merchandise to sell to tourists. I managed to resist, and ended up getting a ride with him back towards time. I arrived back in Palmyra that night around dark and had a good meal before calling it a night and turning in.

The next day I headed for the Krak. Before I could get a bus, a taxi driver heading to Homs (the city nearest to the castle) offered to take me for about four dollars, so I rode with him and a couple of other Syrians on the long drive out of the desert and back into the cities. At Homs I found I had to take another taxi, for about ten dollars, to the castle itself. After stopping to restock on cash at the Homs bank, I headed west to the castle.

After the desert, the relative greenness of the hills closer to the coast seemed absolutely lush. After a half an hour on the highway out of Homs we turned off and headed in a long, winding path up one of the highest hills in the region til finally we turned a corner to see the Krak, a huge castle built with a commanding view over the surrounding countryside in three directions. It was too late to visit the castle that night, so I booked a hotel roof–three dollars a night–and walked around, watching the light turn colors and then fade over the countryside below.

I woke the next morning to a cool and cloudy day, and headed to the castle. Krak des Chevaliers is essentially the Crusader castle–the model on which all after were based. It was never conquered until the west finally pulled out of Syria and the garrison left. It consists of a massive outer wall and a high inner keep, and is catacombed underneath with water cisterns, dungeons, and who knows what else. None of it is lit, either, and I didn’t have a decent flashlight at the time, so I did the best I could with my camrea flash and a lighter. The castle even had a hammam, or a Turkish bath, and the view from the command tower inside the keep commands the entire country for miles in every direction. The Crusaders stationed here, I thought, had it pretty good.

Old stones can only hold the interest so long, though, and in the early afternoon I headed back into Homs in a rickety transport van, bouncing along the highway east across Syria with Arabic music blasting on the radio. From Homs I headed north to Aleppo, where I had to switch bus stations for the trip into Turkey. By now it was late, and I decided to stay another night there. I met a group of around six British students and a German by the name of Sven, who were staying at a hostel I very much wished I known about when I was here a week ago. It was only a couple of blocks from where I’d stayed before, and a fraction of the price–only about five dollars a night, in an old stone building with wrought-iron staircases and a comfortable lounge on the top floor. I had dinner with Sven outside the Citadel, then met up with the Brits for drinks at the Baron hotel, a throwback from the early twentieth century with a guest list that includes Charles Lindberg, Agatha Christie, and T.E. Lawrence.

I bought “Revolt in the Desert” by Lawrence there for the bus ride up to Turkey. There were no regular busses to Turkey the next day, but the hostel owner had a “friend of a friend” who knew of a bus at noon. I headed to the bus station, thankfully close, and found the bus. I was surprised to note that I was the only passenger other than the four employees, but passed it off as a bad business day, and settled in to read. For the record, if anyone wants a masterpiece of travel and autobiographical writing, pick up Revolt in the Desert.

As we neared the border, I found out why the bus was empty. The employees, none of whom spoke English, began pulling cartons of cigarettes out of the overhead bins, ripping them open, and storing the packs in rows under seat cushions, in trash bins, and everywhere else in the bus they could find. One of them handed me a shopping bag with two cartons, about twenty packs each, and said, “say yours”–the extent of her English.

It seemed I had fallen in with cigarette smugglers. They were nice people, and I’m always happy to stick it to the man, so to speak, so I went along with their plan whole-heartedly. When the border officials searched our luggage, the officer raised his eyebrows at me. “Like to smoke, eh?”

“Yep,” I answered, “sure do.” We got through the border without a hitch, to the general applause of the smugglers, to whom I became an instant friend thanks to my performance. “Thank you!” one of the women said, grinning. “Bravo!”

The bus was supposed to go to the bus station at Antakya, but apparently smuggling buses go somewhere else. This one dropped me off at a gas station with instructions in Turkish to a friend they had there. So I sat for two hours at a gas station half an hour outside of Antakya, talking as best I could with the attendants, who did their best to teach me some Turkish, and, as always with middle eastern hospitality, gave me plenty of tea.

I did finally get on a bus to the bus station, which was on its way to pick up passengers eaastbound, and sat for about a half hour at a maintenance station out in the beautiful Turkish countryside at sunset while the crew cleaned and prepared for the bus. Then it was a four hour ride north and east to Gaziantep, where, completely out of Turkish cash, I slept in a field near the station.

The next morning, another beautiful day in Turkey, I walked into town and finally found an ATM to get some cash. Then a good Turkish breakfast and back to the station. At the last moment I decided to go through with my original plan to see eastern Turkey, or as much of it as I could before I had to head back to Istanbul, and took the bus to Batman. In typical Turkish style, that meant paying a driver who happened to be leaving the station the ticket fare, then getting dropped off at the station in Diyarbakir, where the bus driver had a friend who was heading to the other station in the city, where _that_ driver had a friend who was heading in a smaller bus to Batman. There were no other westerners at all at these stations, and I was again something of a celebrity, surrounded by a crowd of kids who worked there, who taught me the Turkish numbers, tried to sell me extra water and sesame seed bagels, and had their pictures taken.

Finally, I caught a dolmus from Batman to Hasankeyf, and arrived just before sunset. The trip east had been across wide rolling grasslands and fields of corn, blue sky marked by an occasional column of black smoke where a farmer was clearing his fields. When I finally approaced Hasankeyf, the ground opened up into the wide Tigris river valley, with high sandstone cliffs along the river’s edge, red with the setting sun. Atop the cliffs was a ruined city dug right into the rock. I took some pictures before it got to dark and then had a fish dinner at one of the open-air restaurants built on wood platforms out over the water.

The next morning it was out into the heat again, Bedouin headgear and all, to explore the clifftop ruins. The city was built on a high mesa of rock, with sheer cliffs on all sides, and only two trails lead to the top–both carved into the rock. It’s been around for over 4000 years now, and, despite its perfect defensive position, has been conquered by everyone from the Romans to the initial Arabic muslim empire, the Mongols, and the Ottomans. The Mongols, as usual, destroyed everything, so the most intact actual buildings are the Ottoman ones–several mosques and the rebuilt Roman fortress on the cliff edge. More interesting, though, are the network of underground cave houses in the city proper. Most of them have multiple rooms, some multiple levels and built-in cisterns. There’s nothing left inside now but sand and the occasional fragment of pottery, but it’s not hard to imagine what this city must have been like in its heyday, prosperous, with it’s wide open view across the green-and-red cliffs around and the winding Tigris below.

Tomorrow I’m continuing my path eastward, taking a bus to Tatvan a few hours further east, where I’ll take a boat across Lake Van before turning north and beginning the long curve back towards Istanbul. I just hope I can see everything I want to before I have to head back to the States.

Somehow, I doubt it.