Thought I’d post this as a separate post purely for the comedic value of me, sat in an interrogation booth at an Israeli airport, highly unsettled about the prospect of being cavity searched by two surly Israeli border guards wielding semi-automatic guns…
Middle East
I S R A E L (part 1 – Jerusalem)
Israel was to be our 5th and final country – and a logical place to end the trip, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, budget airlines such as EasyJet and Jet2 provide regular services to the UK from Tel Aviv, reducing the cost of getting home and secondly, whilst you cannot enter Syria or Lebanon with an Israeli stamp in your passport, you are able to enter Israel with a Syria/Lebanon stamp. This sounds straightforward in principle, yet ended up involving interviews with the Israeli Defence Force and almost being strip searched.
J O R D A N
Country number 4 on the trip was the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan – a large patch of desert claimed in the scramble for territory in the Middle East, and relatively politically and economically stable given its lack of resources and small population. We arrived by air into King Hussain Airport in Amman, ready for the next part of the adventure.
L E B A N O N (part 2 – Tripoli & Baalbek)
I have directly funded political terrorism (but we’ll get to that later). Our first adventure in Lebanon outside Beirut was the ruins of Baalbek, in the Bekka valley of Eastern Lebanon. The diminutive size of Lebanon means that whilst nothing is particularly far away from anything else, even the smallest difference can offer a dramatic change in both environment, scenery and culture. Apparently in Lebanon you can wake up in the east and go skiing, then have your afternoon nap by the pool overlooking the sea in 30 degree heat, the same day.
L E B A N O N (part 1 – Beirut)
Lebanon was a bit of a weird one for me, as it is a country I knew relatively little about. For my parents and their generation, ‘Lebanon’ would always be preceded by ‘war torn’ and ‘Beiruit’ always by ‘besieged’. The only comparable I guess we have nowadays is news reports of ‘war torn Syria’, and the shelling, bombing and urban warfare shown in special correspondent reports on the BBC. Yet in 2010 (and broadly speaking now) Lebanon was a safe country to visit, and we were excited to leave Syria and experience country number 3.
S Y R I A (part 2 – Damascus)
The distance between Aleppo and Damascus is relatively short, yet the train’s estimated arrival time of 8pm suddenly, without warning or reason, became 10:30pm. The city planners were clearly on an off day when they planned Damascus train station, which is situated 15 miles from the city centre. We ended up getting in a taxi and asking to be taken to the city centre where we would work out where to sleep that night. If we thought the driving in Aleppo was bad, the driving in Damascus is something else altogether. Nothing makes your life flash before your eyes like being in the back of a Syrian taxi, in the dark, not wearing a seatbelt, doing about 70 miles per hour on the wrong side of the road, the wrong way round a roundabout, being driven by a man who is simultaneously on the phone and fiddling with the radio. Continue reading
S Y R I A (part 1 – Aleppo)
Now in all honesty, our journey so far hadn’t been particularly adventurous. I mean, 2.5m British tourists visit Turkey each year, and the country is not usually referred to as a niche travel destination. It wasn’t until the 4th day of the trip that things really got interesting, as we headed toward the Turkey/Syria border. Looking back, this is now one of the most thought provoking parts of the trip. The border crossing we used has gone on to become one of the most symbolic parts of the Syrian refugee crisis, with hundreds of thousands of Syrians attempting to cross into Turkey to escape the civil war. Nowadays it seems impossible that two people would be able to cross over in the opposite direction, but in July 2010 we were happily in the back of a taxi waiting to cross into our second country.
L X T H R D G 