Exploring Syria ....

Wow wow wow :) Syria is such a fascinating country. I think that it's taken awhile to get past the images that the media puts out about countries like this but it's definitely nothing like the way we see it at all. Everyone is so friendly, welcoming and accepting and it's a great country to travel around :) We've been out exploring away from the main cities for the last few days and it's been an adventure .....

We starting off making our way by bus up to Palmyra which has a whole city of rose rock ruins of an old roman/greek civilization and a big castle on the hill top overlooking the ruins and the town. We explored the main ruins in the afternoon sun and then went up to the castle (I wouldn't mind having one like this) to watch the sun set which was beautiful and it must be one of the better places in the world to watch the sunset from :)

We were up early the next morning (we were going to watch the sunrise but slept through it, opps!!) and went out into the desert surrounding the ruins to poke around the tomb towers. They are the only tombs in the world that are marked by towers and two of them were in pretty good condition so we got a feel for what they were like. It was an impressive backdrop with the barren hill covered with remains of towers. We trekked back into town and after falafels and hummus ...... yep still eating them, although I've now discovered the traditional sandwiches (which Beth unfortunately can't eat) so there's always a toss up at dinner time now .... jumped on the bus to Homs and then onto Hamas.

The next day we were up early again and backtracked a little to Crac des Chevaliers which is an impressive crusaders castle. Bruno (a French guy that we met in Palmyra) knew the history of the castle and took us around it. Brilliant engineering in the fact that a lot of it is underground so it's relatively cool too! Always good when you almost cook every time you step outside over here!

We caught the train to Allepo the next morning with Miles and Jamal who've been traveling with us since Palmyra. At the train station a lady and her litter(brood? collection? there's so many kids over here, apparently 50% of the population is under 20 years old!) of children came and sat on the bench with us. She didn't speak English but she was really friendly and we communicated with her through gestures and Jamal (who can speak Arabic). She had 7 children! and wanted to know how many Beth and I had, she looked quite shocked when we both said 0 ..... we must look like we are child bearing age! lol. oh well :)

We've been in Aleppo now for the last couple of days and have spent the time wandering the old city and looking through the souqs (very narrow alley ways full of market stalls that go for km's). We were all excited about having a traditional bath (massage, exfoliate, sauna) yesterday on womens day but the place was closed, something to add to the list of things to do in Turkey!

This morning we ventured out to Qala'at Samaan which is where the remains of a huge church are located around the tower that St Simeon sat on for his last 36 years. It was an impressive site and it gave us another look at the rural Syrian countryside. There seems to be km's without anything and then all of a sudden some crops and a wee town and then nothing (read absolutely nothing but rock and a sprinkling of very small shrubs every now and then!) again.

Aleppo is more conservative than the other cities that we have been to here, a lot more ladies in the full face scarfs and not many at all with no scarfs. We sat in the mosque (in the ladies room) and watched the world go by yesterday afternoon and there was such a range of different levels of covering. Apparently the full coverage is because they believe that showing the ladies face would be distracting to single males :) Imagine that :) There was a beautiful lady that came into the mosque all covered up and then took off her scarf inside (they are allowed to remove the face bit around other women) and she was all made up and really pretty, she chatted with her friends for a bit, prayed and then covered up completely again and left ...... some of them cover absolutely everything - so gloves, socks, long jacket, head and face scarf ..... they must get so hot! It's almost unbearable sometimes in a t-shirt and light trousers!

We are going to make our way into Turkey sometime in the next few days and see what we can discover there :)

Hi to everyone back home! miss you all heaps! lots of love xxxoooo