Desert Photos

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Just Don’t Mention The ‘Nukes…’

           Apologies of the lack of updates, we had three terrific weeks in Iran that seemed to fly by! We got off the train at Tabriz back on 24th April and travelled to Esfahan, Shiraz, Yazd, Kashan, and Tehran before flying back to Tabriz and exiting to Turkey, taking exactly 21 days in all.

           The very first thing I did upon entering Iran was get done out of $12 due what I call “Confusion over the currency” and Karen termed rather more uncharitably, “being an idiot.” Travel rule number 354: ‘Always know your currencies.’ It’s an easy rule to find in the travel rule book, because it comes right before, ‘Don’t blithely give a random stranger on a train $20 to change without having a clue about the currencies involved. You moron.’ So, $12 lighter we alighted at Tabriz and found it a really charming, extremely friendly and perfect little introduction to Iran.

          One of the people we met in Tabriz decided to bring us to his university to meet his professor. Upon first consideration there was little wrong with this suggestion, even allowing for the fact that foreigners are not really supposed to be visiting universities in Iran. Our friend however turned out to be quite vehemently anti-government, spending the taxi journey to the university loudly lambasting Ahmadinejad, Khomeini et al. Sadly he had even had friends arrested and beaten by government troops for protesting. Again, we could deal with this. Where we began to get nervous was when we arrived at the university and after sneaking past security found ourselves in the basement floor of the building. Our friend turned out to study electrical engineering. Thus, day three in the ultra-paranoid Islamic Republic of Iran found Karen and I in the laboratory of a university, illicitly, and accompanied by a known agitator. This was not quite what we had planned.

           In fairness it should be pointed out that all the people we met on our first stop in Iran, including the student above were among the friendliest and most welcoming we’ve met in our entire trip. At one point it looked as like it was going to be difficult for us to manage to actually spend any money in Iran such were the amounts of free tea/coffee/lunches/bus rides and the like offered to us.

            Yazd was probably one of the highlights of the entire trip. We came for the picturesque mud-build houses and epic views of the desert but ended staying thanks to the brilliant hospitality at the Dutch-run hostel. With the weather too hot during the middle of the day to facilitate much sight-seeing it was great to have somewhere to chill out. Yazd was also where the growing addiction to the non-alcoholic beer became apparent, with the result that I clearly won’t be able to order a beer anymore at home without first asking if it can be peach flavoured, such was my reliance on them in Iran. It’s one thing to have a problem with alcohol, but you don’t even know the meaning of the word ‘addiction’ until you’ve tried, and begun to rely on, a Lemon Bavaria on a hot Iranian afternoon. I’ve seen the future and it’s fruit flavoured. My emails to Guinness suggesting that they begin manufacturing a peach stout have thus far gone unanswered. 

            On one of the days we spend there (we intended to stay two and left five days later), we went out on a day trip to a few of the surrounding sights including the Zoroastrian temple at Chak Chak and then out into the desert to climb the dunes, see the sun set and enjoy a campfire-lit picnic.

         Going out with a larger group made a nice change but also reminded us of our linguistic short-comings- the whole day’s trip was conducted in English. Total number of native English speakers in the group of 15? Karen and Martin. We also got to watch some very earnest amateur photographers in action- it always baffles me to see these people, weighed down by a tonnage of equipment and then unable to take a photo of anything unless it involves leaning backward, standing on their heads, bending vertically around a tree or lying flat on the ground. Just point and click for God’s sake! Life isn’t supposed to look like a Vogue photo-shoot (except on some of Beirut’s trendier boulevards).

            The Zoroastrian temple was a little disappointing as despite it’s remarkable location on a cliff top in the desert the actual building itself isn’t much to write home about. It also really took it out of everyone to clamber for half an hour up the mountain in the afternoon heat so when the crowds of tourists took off their shoes at the door to enter the place got a bit pongy. Any remaining decorum was shattered by the soaking wet floor which left everyone (including yours truly) who entered in socks, hastily yanking their trousers up and taking their socks off to keep in their pockets.

           We only spent a day in the ultra-conservative town of Kashan, a few hours drive from Tehran- though we probably weren’t able to give it the time it deserved thanks to tiredness and time constraints. We will however, remember the tutting that followed us (or rather, Karen) around due to the crime she had committed in not covering her entire person in heavy black curtains. Clearly, bright colours are a bit of an issue in this part of the country and the severe religious intolerance Karen showed by wearing an orange headscarf and green top led naturally to the outraged clucking from some of Kashan’s most respectable members of the community.  The other memorable thing about Kashan was the library in the hotel we stayed at- the most random assortment of Shakespeare, 1920′s Marxist economic treatise, Russian history books from the 1930′s, books about American television of the 1960′s, and academic journals concerning global collectivisation. I’d like to meet the person(s) who stayed in the hotel before us, though I’m not sure I’d like to stay and chat too long.

           Anyway, further updates later and pictures also!

Into the wilderness…

In the desert, Iran.

Updates…

…coming soon!

Antakya

Finally…

…some new clothes!

Our Second Visit to Hama

The Tree Series

“We’ll Just Turn Up And Find Something…” and other mistakes

So we arrived in Beirut only to find there was no room at the inn. Or the two other budget-priced inns in the area. In despair after having endured a bus journey of several hours from Damascus and a border crossing, we were about to give up when we saw the sign, lit up like a big lit up beacon in the distance: ‘Hotel al-Naim.’ The wooden sign below it stated: “Private rooms for families.’ As we were unsure what this meant we, sensibly, disregarded it. Sure, it wasn’t the cleanest looking building in an area that looked like an industrial site battered by years of civil war, but, seasoned travellers by now, we’re able to deal with a bit of discomfort to save money.

In hindsight, we were misled by the sign: “Hotel al-Naim.” Sure, “Homeless Shelter al-Naim,” wouldn’t have had the same ring, but it would have given us a chance. Tired and fed up as we were, we would probably have been able to distinguish from the latter name that we should try our luck elsewhere.

Because so tired were we that we manged to throw our bags on the beds and leave the room in search of food, ignoring the dead flies on the floor, the open hole in the wall covered by a mere wire mesh, the brutally loud fan, the rock hard beds and the lack of other backpackers. We noticed the ‘Hotel’ wasn’t the cleanest. And we really would have preferred it if the door closed properly. But the fact that we were staying in a shelter wasn’t immediately apparent to us.

The fact that something might not be right was discretely suggested to us by the manger of a hostel across the road. Enquiringly as to the availability of rooms there the following night he asked us where we were staying that night. His response, when we told him, was measured: “You should not stay there. It bad place. If you had said you were staying at Nearby Hostel 1, I would have said that was good. If you had said, Nearby Hostel 2, better….but Al-Naim? Is bad place. Is dangerous. Be careful.” Feeling more and more like characters in a B-movie we thanked the man for his re-assuring words and left. Much deliberating later, we returned to “Hotel” Al-Naim. There was noone around. This was slightly disappointing given that by this stage we were anticipating the possibility of being attacked by an knife-wielding (homeless) maniac. (Karen had determined to run. Having seen a nature documentary on jungle life once in the distant past, my defense was to spread myself as wide as possible, hissing loudly in the hope the predator would assume me to be more dangerous than I actually was. It’s probably best we never got to try this out.)

Indeed, we ended up staying, enduring little more than a nervy night’s sleep. And we even lay in in the morning, when we intended to leave at dawn. Sure, we were woken at 7am but a drunken sounding lunatic shouting the same three words over and over again around the corridors. And sure, we had an array of magazines strewn on the floor, jumping from one to the other to avoid walking on the insects. But we survived. High on life, we danced out into the cratered streets and a taxi to an entirely different part of town to stay in a $60/night hotel, flies not included.

The Pedestal Series

Things I Don’t Understand #354

Why do women in full-length burkas, which even cover their eyes, take photos of one another at tourist attractions? Surely it could be anyone in there?

Hearing the Call

Kito told us the following story last week- I can’t vouch for it’s veracity but I really want it to be true:

The call to prayer gets recited from mosques five times a day from a series of loudspeakers erected on the minarets of each building. In a Syrian town, the Muezzin (who chants the call over the speakers) was getting old and blind. The elders of the mosque decided to retire him and merely place a radio to the speaker each day and play the call to prayer from the radio broadcast. This went well for several days, until the Muezzin’s grandson happened to borrow the radio to listen to a pop station, innocently replacing the radio beside the speaker.

While the others mosques in the surrounding area started their evening call to prayer, the radio came on as it was set to do and they were joined by the dulcit tones of the latest Egyptian pop sensation blaring out from the mosque. After several minutes of frantic scrambling to the radio the music was replaced by the melodic sound of a radio being tuned until the relevant station was eventally located and set.

The old Muezzin got his job back the following day.

Dead Cities and Death Threats

At Damascus we had met an American named Kito and we (almost literally) ran into him again on our first day in Hama along with a Scottish-born New Zealander called Rob he had met on the bus coming up from Damascus. Hama is famous for it’s creaking norias (water-wheels). Apparently experienced engineers can tell the health of the wheels by listening to the distinctive creak each one makes. Even the most experienced engineers would have had trouble determining the health of each of Hama’s noria’s due to the fact the water seems to have long ago stagnated and now forms a pretty solid sludge that smells like the toilets at a League of Ireland stadium.  They look undeniably pretty and make a nice change, but when you see pictures of them, try to remember they were probably taken as fast as possible as we fled the vacinity.

We intended to use Hama as a base to explore the region further and this was helped immensely by the fact that Rob, married to a Syrian and living on and off in the region over the past number of years, spoke Arabic. We were thus able to see parts of the country that would otherwise have been too difficult to organise- getting off between stops, negotiating taxi fares and the like.

The first place we visited was Ma’aret an Nu’aman, where we could get a bus to see a couple of the Dead Cities- ancient settlements that had been abandoned some 15 centuries previously. There’s hundreds such sites around the region so we elected for two of the most evocative, Serjilla and Al-Bara.

Ma’aret an Nu’aman itself has some of the mosaics recovered from these settlements but the town is more (in)famous for an event that happened during the First Crusade where the Crusaders, having breached the towns walls and massacred some 20, 000 of it’s people, then resorted to cannibalism, so hungry were they. One witness wrote: “In Ma’arra our troops boiled pagan adults in cooking-pots; they impaled children on spits and devoured them grilled.” Another noted: “I shudder to tell that many of our people, harassed by the madness of excessive hunger, cut pieces from the buttocks of the Saracens already dead there, which they cooked, but when it was not yet roasted enough by the fire, they devoured it with savage mouth.”

Unfortunately there were no mosaics of this.

The Dead Cities were amazing to walk around, hidden deep in the hills. Half ruined baths, and taverns, houses and cisterns lay weathered but still standing defiantly in the sun. It was just possible to imagine what the town must have been like at its peak; the experience both beautiful and eerie.   

With so many buildings, many private, still standing, the effect was somewhat like a Byzantine era ‘Through the Keyhole’ - sneaking through people’s homes searching for evidence of the owner.

The fourth place we went to was Ebla was a Bronze Age settlement, at one time the largest in the world. It’s situated three kilometres from the main road- the ‘Bronzers’ as they’re (probably) known, having hadmore important things to worry about than tourists and their attendent infrastructural needs. Like war, conquest, famine and death. We were however, spared the walk by an obliging lorry driver who allowed the four of us to squeeze into his cabin.

Rob had previously told us that he had so far managed to resist the Middle Eastern custom whereby men often hold one another’s hand, hug, sit on one another’s knees, and generally radiate gentle affection for one another. Sitting on Kito’s knee in a cramped lorry cabin it was reckoned he had probably finally gone native.*

The site itself is impressive and fairly extensive, surrounded on all sides by massive slopes built to repel potential invaders. Although the size of these slops has diminished over the years it still offered the, one would think, once in a lifetime opportunity to storm a Bronze Age settlement. Sadly my repeated shouts of ‘Go away!’ were, despite my lofty position, not enough to deter Kito who charged the bank and gained the top. This advance would most likely have been more laudable had not the determined invader collapsed breathless at the top. We were beginning to see who the site had remained unconquered for so long- any prospective invading army would have had to stop for a tea break halfway to the top, and again at the top.

We were about the only tourists there, Ebla falling well off the main trail, but the site itself remains a cenre of activity in some respects. Bedoin tribes camped and farmed nearby as shepherds tended to flocks of sheep where temples and libraries had once loomed, adm0nishing ancient settlers. Goats strolled across hills that at one time offered protection to a beleaguered townspeople. With this in mind it was extraordinary to be walking the ramparts as the sun went down, although it’s difficult to say of this magical effect was heightened or diminished by the band of assorted Bedoin children who followed us around the latter stages, clutching terrified lambs and kids (as in, baby goats) in their arms and asked to have their photo taken. It’s odd how often the only English these children know are is ‘Hello’ and ‘money.’

There are many ‘don’t do’s’ in the associated with travel in the Middle East and scampering across a motorway at night is probably among them. Getting stuck in the countryside at night is probably another though, so with that in mind we attempted to hitch home. After several long minutes huddled together by the side of the road someone had the (quite literally) bright idea of waving a torch and Kito, ever prepared, was able to produce one. Careful not to point it directly into a hapless driver’s eyes and have him careen into us (another ‘don’t do’), he elected instead to illuminate his own face which had the happy effect of drawing a speeding bus to a halt some yards down the road from us.

The evening itself was enlivened further by a rather over-’friendly’ waiter at the cafe we were at. Upon learning of Kito’s nationality he proceeded to make ever more threatening ‘banter’ with him regarding it- the folly in coming to Syria uppermost in this one-sided verbal jousting. This was fine and rather fun at ‘You’re very brave to come here,’ but rather more worrisome around the point where he came back brandishing a butter knife and warning, ‘Stay here, I call police on you.’ Still, it’s heartening to know a Basil Fawlty/Professor Snape hybrid is hanging around serving tea in centra Hama, isn’t it?

*On one of his first visits to the Middle East, Rob had asked for directions in Arabic, only for one of the (very) willing Syrians to grab his hand and drag him along the street, leaving Rob wondering what on earth he had asked of the man. I couldn’t help but be reminded of the Monty Python sketch with the Hungarian Phrasebook.

Damascus and Palmyra

Drinks in Angelina’s Haunt

Last week I sat in Angelina Jolie’s seat and sipped a beer looking out over the Amman skyline.

Myself, Karen and three nice German’s we met were bored. We’d decided to go to the cinema, which turned out to be within Le Royal Hotel complex perched on one of Amman’s many hills. This meant we had the unique experience of being searched and metal detectored before we entered the building, unless you live in Tallagh. Our hostel didn’t have a TV; this hotel had it’s own cinema. When going to the movies involved being padded down by a charming fellow in full evening wear, you know it’s going to be expensive, and for this reason we decided to forego the dubious delights of Shutter island in favour of a good old dash through the back-stairs of Amman’s most prestigious hotel in an effort to reach the roof on the 23rd floor.

After much wasted time on stairways and fire escapes, a couple of near-misses with staff, and fairly illegal attempts to make the lift go past the 11th floor using a discarded keycard, we had to abandon the attempt. Le Royal had won, it’s lifts cunningly barred from going above a certain floor without a keycard. Enter ‘Mr David’ and his glamourous ladyfriend who happened to be descending in the lift with us as we bemoaned our fate. Eleven floors might have been disappointing for us, but they gave plenty of time to get talking to the couple, who turned out to be involved in Iraqi security. Exciting stuff. Even more exciting, from our point of view (literally), was that they decided to take us up to the rooftop bar to show us the view.

We stumbled out of the lift, doing our best to blend in the with our surroundings- we were in baggy, old, unwashed for days linen trousers with practical shirts and bags stuffed with cameras and guidebooks; everyone else was in tuxedos and ballroom dresses. We pretended not to notice and enjoyed the stunning view out over the capital of Jordan from one of it’s most famous hotels. While we grilled the nice gentleman about his work in Iraq (Q: “Is is dangerous?” A: “Yes”), his very nice ladyfriend took it upon herself to order us drinks, before departing for some ball or other, somewhere.

Which is how we found ourselves sipping drinks and talkin with the barman about which famous guests he had served. And which he hadn’t George Bush went to the rival Four Season’s Hotel he announced, unable to hide his disdain. We tinkered with the lamps around the room (working bulbs!), went to the toilet, separately (so clean!), and played with the TV (CNN!) and then it was time to go. Our hostel felt slightly less glamourous. Yeah, it had never felt glamourous. But at least we didn’t have to dress up. And the light’s kind of worked if you twisted them a bit…

Blurry pics below: