Blood Brothers

The next morning I rose early and walked the 20 minutes or so over to the ruins. I was blessedly alone for an hour, not another soul in sight. It was cloudy and the sun only broke through occasionally. I left later on the bus which conveniently stopped in front of the hotel to pick me up.

Upon boarding the bus I was confronted by three beaming faces. Abdul, Mohammed and Ahmed said they were on their way to Beirut and were ecstatic to have me as their travelling companion. We had an hilarious time “conversing” with “ma bif ham” – “I don’t understand” becoming a favourite way for one of them to get me to tell one of his mates to pee off. The desert rolled by outside, punctuated by an occasional Bedouin alighting in the middle of nowhere (although, on close inspection a tent could always be found nearby). The banter became a bit tedious towards the end when a younger guy joined us from the back of the bus and wanted to fly back to “Suisa” with me or at least to have my address. The lads all disembarked in Homs so who knows if they were really continuing to Beirut. If they did so, they would no doubt be treated with disdain by their wealthy neighbours there. The whole bus was full of people (almost all men) from the town of Shakna, a little further up the road from Palmyra. Looking back at them, I was met with a sea of red-turbaned, sun-tanned faces, observing me with gentle curiosity. The boys also knew the English word “donkey” and for a while used it on each other to great effect.

In Homs I was shuttled efficiently into a taxi (for which I paid £200, about $2) that took me straight to the greatest of all Crusader castles, Crac des Chevaliers, known to the locals as Qa’alat Hosn. Before I’d been there too long the place was stormed by German and Japanese tourist-troops in a bizarre Axis-alliance world-domination re-enactment. I resorted to guerrilla tactics in order to avoid them – hiding out in various obscure parts of the castle until the various heavily armed (with photographic equipment) platoons had passed by. In spite of all this, the place truly moved me. Especially the attention to detail that was evident – such as the delicate gothic touches in the Knights’ Hall and in a cupola halfway up one of the towers. In the latter, tiny flowers were carved into the stone around the architrave. A little piece of western Europe, so far from home. There was a young boy wandering from room to room in the castle, singing haunting Arabic songs in some of the acoustically perfect rooms (such as the chapel). Outside the castle again, I walked up the road further to get a view of the citadel as a whole. There was something about the place, I can not despise the foolish men who built it, in the end they are my brothers somehow, however misguided they seem when looked back on by us smug 21st century know-it-alls.

I caught a minibus back down to the main road after refusing to pay £600 for a taxi to Tartus (4 times the going rate). On the way down I noticed a church in Hosn village (if it sounds like you’ve a cleft palate whilst saying that one, you’re pronouncing it correctly) and tried to imagine what the many local Christians thought when their “brothers” from the West arrived 900 years ago to liberate them. I don’t suppose they thought much because they were killed indiscriminately, along with everyone else, regardless of race or creed. But no doubt the church or its predecessor was there in the village before the Crusaders came, whilst they ruled from their stone citadel and after they were given safe passage and left, never to be seen again. I was dropped on the side of the highway at the bottom of the hill and spent about 20 minutes trying to hitch a ride to the coast. It’s during moments like that, that I often become aware of what I’m doing, i.e. standing alone in the middle of nowhere on a highway in Syria for goodness sake, trying unsuccessfully to flag down a taxi, bus, anything. No doubt I provided an exotic spectacle for the locals. I finally got a lift in an “unmarked taxi” into the city of Tartus, which sits on the Mediterranean, and somehow found my way into the centre of town and stumbled upon a reasonable looking guest house. Mission accomplished!

I wandered a little later up to “Our Lady of Tortosa”, another Crusader construction which is best described as a pseudo-church-cum-fortress. It was simply wonderful inside and out and in contrast to Crac, I was completely alone here, except for the rays of late afternoon sunlight slanting in through the narrow, high windows. I had the same feeling as I had had in Crac: somehow there is a light still shining somewhere in these places. At least in part, some of those men were driven by higher ideals. But even the best of people can be seduced by the easy success that violence promises.

I left Our Lady and strolled through the littered, “Beirut”-looking streets of the old town and joined the many residents taking a walk along the beach before sunset. There were waves crashing on the sandy beach, unfortunately also strewn with rubbish, an all too common sight in the Middle East. The sun inched its way down towards the sea, casting its blinding light onto the water. Families were out walking on the beach, shoes remaining firmly on. To the south lay the mountains of Lebanon, snow-capped but blurred by haze.

So out of the west they came, the Salabi, with blood-red crosses on their chests. And they ruled this town for 180 years until they finally left, sailing no doubt from the island of Arwed, which sits guarding Tartus, into the blinding light of the west.

I was reminded of Sting’s song about his home city of Newcastle, an “edge-of-the-empire garrison town”:

they lived and they died and they prayed to their gods

but their stone gods did not make a sound

and the empire crumbled and all that was left were the stones the workmen found …

Men go crazy in congregations, they only get better one-by-one.

The next day was the most difficult day of travel I experienced on my trip. I went for a wander at about 7:30 down to the pier and considered a trip out to Arwed but in the end decided I’d rather get on the road. I walked again through the very compact old town back to my hotel. I checked out and headed to what I considered the “main” bus station but according to everyone I attempted to communicate with, there were no buses to Lebanon, just taxis. No one spoke any form of English. I got a local taxi to the main taxi area in town (which turned out to be about 400m away from the “main” bus station!) where they informed me it would cost $50 for a taxi to Beirut or $10 if shared with 4 others. I agreed to share and sat in the car for 45 minutes with no sign of anyone else turning up. A forlorn hope, surely. I don’t think any locals would travel to Lebanon in that way. To keep up the pretence, the driver shouted out “Beirut” occasionally but there was no one to hear him except the 10 other taxi drivers standing around chatting and smoking. Eventually I got talking to a guy who knew a bit of German – the prices got worse – $20 just to border, in a shared taxi. So I gave up and returned to the hotel. The girl working there, Rania, and another guy were shocked at the prices. They suggested I stay in Tartus. So I decided to try my luck by going to Lattikia (completely in the wrong direction but a more significant transport hub) but the guy suggested going back to Homs and catching a bus from there to Tripoli (in Lebanon). As a last resort I walked to the train station and realised as I approached that I’d found the right place. It was swarming with buses, minibuses and taxis. I found myself immediately on a minibus to the Al-Aarida border. I asked “how much” and suggested £100, thinking that would be lower than the going rate. The driver accepted very eagerly and as it turned out, everyone else only paid £10. But, I was more than happy. An attractive dark-eyed girl got on and sat next to me – after a while, she looked at me once or twice. Eventually I returned her gaze, she said “hello” and “welcome in Syria”. She asked me if she could help me. I said I needed to get to border but she misunderstood me and thought I had asked her to travel with me to the border. She was a little embarrassed and said, no, she was disembarking before then. But she spoke to the driver and told him I wanted to be taken to the border and she attempted to pay my fare. He, however, was not ready to give up his cash-cow quite so easily and in the end she had to give up. She got out a couple of minutes later and once again said “welcome in Syria”. What a lovely soul.

I arrived at the border and walked through, getting the appropriate array of stamps from a variety of offices situated along the way. I ended up at Lebanese customs where a border guard started chatting to me. He gave me a coffee and we yakked a bit about wives, marriage, children, divorce (it’s easy for Muslims, he said – she just left). I continued on a hundred metres or so and asked some loitering taxi drivers about the fare to Tripoli or Jbail (Byblos – where I was heading). Once again “ka-ching”, dollar signs in their eyes and $45 to Jbail, no, no “service” sharing possible. I walked back to the border guard and asked him what the best way was to continue travelling south – he was dismissive of the local people and instead organised a ride for me with a truck driver heading for Tripoli. It cost me nothing. He dropped me at the edge of town, I started walking in, a local taxi picked me up and took me to the bus station where I boarded a bus to Jbail and Beirut. LL1000 each for the taxi and the bus and nought for the truck ride = a grand total of $1.33, not $20, not $45, not $50. Just to make my day a little more interesting, the bus driver didn’t stop at Jbail and I ended up scrambling off a couple of kilometres further on after realising what had happened.

Paying too much doesn’t bother me because of the cost but because these people have ceased to relate to me as a human being. I have become an object of wealth, to be abused in any way. Trust no longer exists in the interaction and therefore everything becomes unpleasant. For example, the two guides I had in Palmyra. The first related to me as a human being, the second did not. On this day of travel, the hotel people, the girl on the minibus, the border guard, the truck driver, the taxi driver in Tripoli, the bus people, the falafel people I bought my lunch from – all of them were just great. The experience was only soured by the Tartus taxi drivers, the “cash-cow” minibus driver and the loitering taxi drivers at the border. All of these individuals did not hesitate to take advantage of my vulnerability. Travelling by oneself and being willing to be vulnerable inevitably draws out this contrasting response – it seems to amplify the good and the not-so-good in human interactions.