Things appeared to be looking up: no trips to the toilet since Palmyra! I got up, and had the usual hotel breakfast. Then I packed, settled up, and attempted to find a new hotel. The choice in this dump of a town was so bad that I ended up in the Hotel Damas, at 200 Syrian per night, allegedly the best of the cheapies in the area - I wouldn’t like to see the others! This was the worst place I have ever seen. It was so filthy, the cockroaches had moved out in disgust at the living conditions. At least there was no dilemma as to where to place the single sheet most Syrian hotels gave you - above it under the filthy duvet, or beneath it on the dirty matress: here, there were no sheets at all! The blankets were foul, the mattresses even worse. I then had the problem of which bed looked the least worrying to sleep in. The window was hidden by a shredded curtain, which was just as well, as it consisted of a rusty iron grid holding lots of shreds of plastic sheeting, which were flapping in the wind. As I checked in and the old guy took my passport, looked at it, looked at me, and asked "Farans, Italian?" He couldn’t read western script, yet he ran a hotel, which required him to take passport details every day. He also couldn’t grasp where I had come from - Hotel Raghdan next door - so in the end I told him Palmyra, as he was most insistent that I must have come from Palmyra, Raqqa or Aleppo.
The Lonely Planet guide to Syria has since been udpated. No longer the bargain place in Deiz-ez-Zawr to stay, it is now described as follows:
Places to Stay The Hotel Damas is now a place to be avoided. Rooms are battered and filthy, while showers (watch out for the holes in the walls) and toilet facilities are crude, to say the least. In addition, we've received several letters from women warning us of the inapproriate behaviour of some members of staff.
My second project was to find out how to take a train out of Deir ez Zawr the next day, and get a ticket. After much driving around I managed to find the station, but it was deserted. There was also no information in a form legible to me. So I went back into town, to the Raghdan, to ask where I could find out about train times and costs. The bloke showed me the basic direction. This is going to be fun, I thought. After some time I found the office in question, which was both occupied and open, and eventually I got the information I wanted - there was a train at 8.45 the next morning, so I should come back at 8 tomorrow. This would get me to Aleppo nice and early. Good.
Next: find the Europcar office and its opening times. Another driving stint was required. I drove out to the Furat Cham Palace hotel, but it turned out they had no agent (contrary to what my guide book claimed), but they were able to give me instructions to the Europcar office in town. The map they drew me was supposed to help me find it. Supposed to. I went back into town, and parked outside the police station to ask them directions. All they did was tell me I couldn’t park there. Dense bastards, I thought to myself, I’ve only stopped there to ask you directions. Still no progress ("No parking here, park there, park there, no parking here!") Oh, go and drown yourselves in the Euphrates, I thought, and left them to their fretting. I tried a traffic policeman. No go. I parked, walked about the town, and found the blinking place in the end. OK, they said, anytime before 8 that evening would be fine. I went back to my car, ready to leave town. It was 11 o’clock. I had left my hotel at 9. I was nearing the end of my tether.
I made my way to Doura Europos, but the drive was hard work, as the road was abysmal, the traffic was heavy and the population was dense (in both senses of the word), and, consequently, all over the road. I also wasn’t sure what exactly I was looking for. All I knew was that my guide book said I couldn’t miss it. The map, naturally, was useless. Just as I started wondering whether perhaps I had gone too far, I saw it before me. The book was right, it was impossible to miss - a line of tall walls with towers, about 1km off the road.
The approach road leading up to the site was marked by three dead sheep in a cluster, attended to by gigantic vultures which took off whenever anyone passed by. I made a mental note to try to photograph them later - the vultures, that is, not the sheep.
Doura Europos was once one of the mightiest frontier fortresses in the Roman Empire, but it later fell to the Sassanids, and, although it later fell back under the control of the Byzantines, it never regained its importance. However, it has been the site of the discovery of numerous Roman military artefacts. The entrance to the site is stunning - the walls reach almost to their original height, albeit because they are protected by sand dunes on the exposed side. The Palmyra gate is vast. As I went in I was accosted by Bedouin wielding a shotgun (though not in a threatening manner, but he could always have become aggressive later), demanding a baksheesh of 100 as he was the site guardian. He took me to be French. I thought it better to pay and have peace.
I entered the site by a small side gate, and then turned left along the walls to the synagogue (most of which is now in the national museum in Damascus). Then to the partially collapsed tower which the Sassanids mined and Romans counter-mined, leading to a rather grizzly (but useful) discovery this century of the remains of soldiers engaged in hand-to-hand fighting when the tunnel collapsed. I strolled further around the site - it was absolutely baking hot - to the far end and the citadel, which is slowly falling down the cliff into the Euphrates. After scouting around that area, I headed back to the North end of the walls and Mithraeum (which I failed to find, due at least in part to the typical Syrian sign-posting), and then I walked back along the top of the walls to the Palmyra gate.
I thought it was time to move on to Mari. I stopped to photograph the vultures, but they were slow in returning when I left the engine running, and the car instantly superheated without the air conditioning. Onwards.
Mari was once an important city state in the late Sumerian period, but it fell to Hammurabi in BC1796. However, its obliteration at the hands of the Babylonians was fortuitous for archaeologists, as many frescos on the inside walls of the palace were preserved when the walls caved in on top of them, revealing to us many details of everyday life in ancient Mesopotamia.
Mari is easy enough to find - blatantly obvious, in fact, though not as obvious as Doura. Mari is a Tell, the Arabic name for mounds in an otherwise flat landscape. These Tells were generally formed by settlements being founded on a site, the mud brick houses collapsing, a new settlement being founded, etc., over several thousand years. Thus you get sites which can only be ancient settlements littering the landscape.
At Mari, they demanded 200 Syrian admission - a scandal, but what can you do? The only other visitors at the site were a Japanese tour group which was travelling around with Chamtours. The site is most confusing and difficult to make out. Much of the palace is covered by a corrugated iron roof and is barred by barbed wire. The rest of the site is a muddle of holes and mud-brick walls. I decided I’d had enough, and set off for the Iraqi border. As I left, the bus from Passau I saw earlier at Doura arrived - they had come a long way. Apparently they had already been to Jordan in it. It did not look air conditioned, either.
I made it as far as Albu Kamal, 10km from the border, but after much driving around its dust roads I had to give up the search for the border road - I had to forego the pleasure of photographing Iraq, as it was getting late (gone three), and I wanted to get back before nightfall - the road was hard enough work in daylight. I got some orange drinks, as I was dying of thirst by this time, and the water in the shop was "finish", and then I headed back to Deir ez Zawr, a long and hard drive, with no reward in the arrival. When I got to Deir ez Zawr I dumped my luggage in the "hotel", and took my car to the Europcar office. However, I had left some crucial paperwork in the hotel, so the guy got one of his staff to drive me back to pick it up. It served to remind me of the quality of Syrian driving, if nothing else.
I left the Europcar office after a brief chat and a cup of coffee - I don’t know whether the guy was a secret police agent, someone scared of being seen talking too candidly to a Westerner or whether the guy was just being genuine. Anyway, he sounded like the official mouthpiece of the regime as he told me about Assad’s son. Apparently he was well loved - hence all the pictures of him looking like a dodgy Latin American dictator in his military uniform, dark sunglasses and beard, but always with a sad expression on his face. He was killed in a car crash by the airport two years ago (or was he done in by his father because he was getting too popular and powerful? A tragic death would be jolly useful in that way: enhance his son’s reputation even more, and let the glory rub off on papa). Anyway, apparently the country went into mourning, and the government ended up having to tell shops to reopen, as people needed food. The people loved him too much, my friend said. This was because he cared. He would always be out on the streets, asking people how they were and what he could do to help them.
After this fascinating interlude of Ba’ath Party propaganda, I decided to head off into town, and back to my lovely hotel room. As I walked along the main shopping thoroughfare (if it can be called this), pondering what to eat, it suddenly struck me: Bananas! I can eat bananas. They are nutritious, available, and, most importantly, they are safe. Not even a Syrian could manage to poison me with a ripe banana. I bought five of them, three for dinner and two for breakfast. Then I went back to my flea pit to consume this delicacy. They were wonderful. Delicious, succulent, safe. Then I sat down to write my diary for a while, followed by a decision to go for a stroll down by the river.
The evening was wonderful, a warm starry night with just a hint of a coolish breeze to freshen the otherwise humid air. I walked down to the Friendship Bridge, the pedestrian suspension bridge over the Euphrates river - the only structure in the whole of Deir ez Zawr worth mentioning (or even photographing), and, notably, it was built by the French in the 1920s. As I crossed I saw a boy of about 17 chatting to a girl of the same age (which I found striking - you don’t often see this in Syria). Clearly they were going out with each other. Imagine my surprise when later on I saw they had been joined by another boy, and the two boys were walking arm in arm, while the girl walked alongside them. I had become semi-used to the Arab habit of men holding hands or walking arm in arm, but this was bizarre. I decided that I had had enough of this town, and headed back to the hotel, looking forward to my train out of there at 8.45 the following morning.
As I walked back to my room, I spotted a guy about my age lying in his room by himself, door open and a rucksack by his side. I decided to have a chat with him. It turned out to be one of the best decisions of my life. I pulled together all the courage I could muster, went up to the door and knocked. I cannot for the life of me remember what opening line I used, but it got the conversation going. He was travelling alone, just like me. I gathered quite quickly that he was German, so we switched into German almost immediately. His name was Eric, and he invited me in and plied me with drinks and snacks for the rest of the evening.
Early on in our conversation the old guy running the hotel came in, with his usual inane smile. He looked at Eric, then at me, then at Eric again. His smile broadened. He pointed at Eric and said "Alman" (German), then at me and said "Ingleez" (English). "No, no," Eric corrected him, "Alman, Alman." "No, no," I correct Eric, "he’s right, Alman, Ingleez." Eric looked somewhat dumbfounded. He honestly believed that I was German. I took it as a compliment. I rarely do. We spent the rest of the evening comparing travel experiences and expanding on our theories on the Arabs. Speaking in German, we were completely safe - no-one in Syria seems to speak anything even resembling German. It turned out we had met before. While I chatted to the girl in the cafe in Palmyra, her friend was sitting next to me and chatting to another guy through the window. That other guy had been Eric. We couldn’t believe it. I could have had company for another day or so, and he could have got to see Doura and Mari. Typical.
We came to the conclusion that the Arabs are in the mess they are in because they, unlike their Jewish neighbours, are incredibly naiv. You see this in all their actions. At first they may come across as rather stupid and ill-educated. However, when you analyse it you come to realise that it is their sheer naiveté that leads you to this conclusion. You see it everywhere - in the way they worship Hitler because he hated the Jews, in the way they believe they can drive Israel into the sea, in the way they believe in Arab unity despite the fact that they are forever quarrelling and that they would be permanently at each others’ throats but for the presence in the region of a common enemy. In the way they try to rip tourists off without offering anything in return. In the way they believe everything their government tells them without question. In fact, wherever you look, you see it. It’s no wonder the Jews, a people with an age-old reputation for shrewdness, run rings around them.
Having decided this, we bedded down, resolved to get up early and get the hell out of this dump. However, before doing so, I had to add my own comments to the veritable plethora of messages already left on the walls of my room by previous inmates. Then I wrapped myself up like a mummy, due to the absence of any sheets, never mind clean ones. I spanned a dirty shirt over the pillow. Then I put on another used shirt, tucked that into my dirty trousers, and tucked them into my socks. Bearing in mind the unusable state of the shower in that hotel, I was going to smell pretty awful the next day.
Last Updated on 04 February, 2000