Monday 7^th June

Alarm call at 5.00am summoned us down for breakfast ready for a 6.00am departure from the Ebla Cham Palace Hotel. Barely able to face more food so soon, I settled for boiled eggs sensibly avoiding the massive spread of enticing dishes and hot food.

We soon cleared the outskirts of Damascus and the slum areas that still house all the Iraqi refugees and were soon heading east along the road from Damascus to Bagdad and out into the Syrian desert. Our destination was Palmyra which was four hours driving  and several hundred kilometres out into the desert along a narrow, fairly straight single track road flanked by a desolate lunar landscape with a low barren mountain range bordering our left flank for a good part of the way. There was almost no signs of life for the entire trip with just the very  occasional Bedouin tent with a few animals grazing nearby. In fact if it was not for the odd military post or camp we would have seen almost no people at all. We stopped at the halfway point at the ‘Bagdad Cafe’ which was little more than a small house with a handful of tents nearby, a very old Lister twin cylinder standing engine powering a small generator providing the electricity and a windmill driven water pump providing the water from a well. The scene was straight from a movie and the bus seemed very out of place parked outside as the increasing wind was blowing up a pretty good dust cloud. This was our WC stop and that was about all they had to offer and even then you needed to really want to use the facilities to brave them! Mind you there was seating out of the wind and under a cover which was a welcome change from the coach seats.

But soon enough we were back on the road and following a second (and very luxurious) WC stop we entered the ancient city of Palmyra, ‘Queen of the Desert’, which is Syria’s star tourist attraction and one of the world’s most splendid historical sites. Its setting and the profusion of remains is quite stunning sitting as it does in this remote desert oasis setting. Since the beginning of time Palmyra has been central to the safety of the caravans travelling the great trade route (Silk Road) running from the Orient, through Northern India/Pakistan, across Iraq, across the Arabian deserts to the Med. It was the capital of the kingdom created when Queen Xenobia challenged the Romans and conquered most of the Levant and Egypt  in the second century. Its demise started in 273 when the Romans in a brutal reprisal for an attack by the Palmyrians, torched the city and although the temple was later fortified and used as a village with a new fortress being built on a nearby hill top, the final straw was a huge earthquake which devastated the place.

We got off the coach at the start of the 1.6 km main street leading to the massive quadruple Great Colonnade but before the guide could get into his stride we were being pestered by the lads desperately trying to sell scarves and trinkets. They were for the most part very determined but somehow it just is not as invasive as it is in Turkey and as elsewhere, they used very small children to appeal to our generosity and moved around the site to get ahead of us at different points by cramming up to four at a time onto  motorbikes and driving through the ancient ruins. Cannot see them managing this sort of thing at Stonehenge! Our guide took us through the site of the central part of the city to the theatre which was only unearthed in more recent times and is almost totally undamaged. The whole site is quite magnificent and every bit a match for Ephesus. We then visited the huge temple at the end of the main street, enough of which remains to leave you in total awe as the sheer scale of its buildings and the entire city.

Next was lunch and yet another large feast where as usual we all overdid things on the wonderful buffet only to find that there was a main course to follow which was a Bedouin dish of roasted sheep which came to the table complete with the head!

Lunch was followed by a short drive along the valley of tombs where we stopped briefly for the chance for a few photos before setting out back west across the desert heading now for the coast and the magnificent mountain top Crusader fortress of Krak des Chevaliers. It was a three hour trip with yet again nothing to see but mini whirlwinds and more military posts, including an airfield until the final few miles as we emerged from the desert into the coastal hinterland of Syria and the more usual rundown villages and part built housing – but always smiling and waving children.

The coach wound its way up an impossibly narrow and hairpin strewn road to the very top of the mountain (2300 metres) and the entrance to the superb castle. It was inhabited until the late 1930’s when the government emptied everyone (7,000 people) out and the French, under their League of Nations mandate over Syria, began in 1934 an ambitious rebuilding programme that has resulted in visitors being able to walk around and see exactly what the castle was like back in 1170 AD when it housed a huge garrison complete with horses and supplies. It is rightly considered the best preserved of all the Crusader fortresses in the Middle East. Our photos cannot due the place justice as the very best view in a sense is from the valley below in the pass that was the only access through to the interior between Antioch in the north and Beirut in the south, which is dominated by the formidable castle.

Finally we made our way back to Lattakia and the boats where we found that there had been very strong winds in our absence and this time, a very large bollard  had pulled out of the quay! Fortunately Harken on the Najad 570 ‘Ko Ko’ was here and he dealt with the crisis when it happened at 6.00am! Nevertheless there was a very big swell running still and a rising wind which made everything very difficult especially trying to clamber over the bows of Ko Ko onto Serafina as the two boats pitched and rolled.

Photos and full log at www.rhbell.com