I hardly got any sleep that night. Breakfast was at 4.30 a.m. and I had no appetite so early in the morning. However, we had a long day ahead and little time for meal breaks. The road from Damascus to Palmyra alone was 5 hours one way. Knowing that, I forced myself to swallow two […]
Palmyra, Syria, Sep 2024 Read More »
In Damascus Bosra is another ancient city in Syria. During the Roman times, it was the regional capital and a stopover for caravans on the way to Mecca. Today, it is a huge archaeological site containing Roman, Byzantine, and Muslim ruins. It takes 2 hours to get to Bosra from Damascus. The road goes so
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The Golan Heights After breakfast, we said goodbye to Harry – he was leaving Syria early – and set out to explore Damascus. It is continually inhabited since the 3rd millennium B.C. which makes Damascus one of the oldest cities on the world. It is hard for me to imagine how ancient this land is.
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Aleppo to Damascus The road from Damascus to the Golan Heights was going through the desert with little to see and the group used this time to catch up on sleep. We consistently did not get enough hours of it going to bed late and getting up early. Everyone made themselves comfortable as much as
The Golan Heights, Syria, Sep 2024 Read More »
Aleppo Citadel The road from Aleppo to Damascus goes through the city of Hama and its famous water wheels, or Norias of Hama. They are the tallest water wheels in the world and about 500 years old. Back in the 12th century, they were used for irrigation. These days, there are 17 water wheels left
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Aleppo The city of Aleppo is one of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited cities. It is known that settlers already used Citadel Hill in the middle of the 3rd millennium BCE. Most of the constructions on it were done later, in the Middle Ages. The Citadel protected Aleppo from the Crusaders who besieged it unsuccessfully
Aleppo Citadel, Syria, Sep 2024 Read More »
On the coast The road from Latakia to Aleppo looked like from a catastrophe movie. For miles and miles, we rode through ruins. They were left and right, and as far as the eye could see. Hardly anything has been rebuilt since this area was bombed. The residents fled; many went to refugee camps. Others
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Saladin Castle The Royal Palace Hotel was grand indeed, it was built to impress and to host a good number of guests. However, Syria is not a popular tourist destination and nobody else stayed at the hotel besides our group. The night was cool enough to keep the balcony door open and to let in
On the coast, Syria, Sep 2024 Read More »
Tartus We were going from Tartus to Latakia and the main attraction of the day was Saladin Castle. Nobody knows when the first castle was built but when Alexander the Great invaded Syria in 333 BC, the castle was already there. It went through a number of historic stages: Byzantine, Crusaders and Arab-Islamic, and a
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Bulgaria – Lebanon Technically, all we needed to do at the border was to pay for our visas that had been already issued to us and to get our passports stamped. Harry and Fadi collected the money and passports and disappeared in the building. The group waited outside, and waited and nothing happened. We milled
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