Back to Syria

Place: Damascus.

Tunes: None, as you need no distractions while playing Russian roulette in the Lebanese traffic.

You can see on top of the clouds from the tower.

Note the black tapes.

If you dring Playboy energy drink you will be cool and successful, just like him.

It was a short driving day and surprisingly easy. We are getting used to the traffic and apart from the normal near misses, there was no major drama. Also, there was something like 120km to go to Damascus, no more. 


The hotel in Damascus was great but getting the bikes in a safe parking place was a bit of a chore. Some international co-operation and 30min of shuffling the bikes around and it was all well and sorted.

Wrestling with the bikes in Damascus.

Hotel lobby, before we ruined it.

The walls and ceilings were covered in details like this. Very impressive.

Lenin, The Leader and Markus having a welcome drink.

Apparently this place (Damascus, not the hotel) has a bad reputation but so far it has been ok apart from a taxi driver that tried to rip us off. We agreed the price before we started so he did not have too much to argue with. Tosser!

This city is probably one of the oldest cities on the planet. We did some quick sightseeing and saw some old ruins and went to a bazaar/shopping street that has been just that since money was invented. The local food is interesting and good. Nothing is quite like you expect it to be, so everything is interesting. There are some very good (soft) drinks available here with lime and mint and copious amounts of sugar. Even beer was for sale. So, far not bad.

The border crossing was a complete circus on the Lebanese side as expected, but at least it was a lot easier to get out than to get in. On the Syrian side, you had actually something organized with people in uniforms and they were actually doing something to keep it organised. They still put all of the papers of the locals on top of ours at every booth and everyone tried to force themselves in front of us in the ques. However, now we have a secret weapon. 

We have developed this turtle defence thing to fend off the natives so that we can actually get our shit sorted. It resulted in some sad faces and we actually saw some locals queue behind us for the first time. One of us will probably get stabbed at one of these crossings.


The thing that took the longest on the Syrian border was to sort out how much extra we had to pay to the customs officials for filling out our carnet’s – which is actually their job. It’s great to be a tourist when everyone is trying to steal from you.

In between the two borders, there was a massive tax-free shop. Arabs in long traditional robes were buying crates whiskey like there was no tomorrow. Apparently not everyone here is a fundamentalist muslim.

The Leader (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bashar_al-Assad) has decided that blogspot is a waste of time, so it is censored. So, these entries have to wait further. We'll see what happens in Jordan.