Iraq border, Baghdad, subsequent imprisonment and escape

The annoying thing about leaving writing about things is that more things then rack up which you then have to write about. Ponder this whilst I flick through my diary to remind me of what things have racked up which need writing about..

We left Tartus smelling wonderful and feeling similar as our clothes were cleaner than I've ever known them - the grey-white became dazzling white again, and I was nearly blinded with joy. Hafez even insisted on paying for the washing to be done - he was certainly one of the elite of Syria, with a lot of money to throw around to us so that we are convinced that Syria is a great place! Well, he did pretty well and we've told him sternly that if he's ever back in England then he is to call us straight away, which I do hope he does. I was ill at this point, reminded by the diary, but after following a tried-and-tested-on-the-dogs method I starved myself for a couple of days in an effort to starve out the illness. That was pretty unpleasant: being ill is one thing but not being able to eat whilst still physically able to on top of that was mindbreaking. It worked though, my lack of scientific knowledge disallowing me from knowing why, but arriving in Hama I was right as rain.

We had a lot of short lifts to Hama, standard back-of-pickup, with a Syrian-American classic case of marrying for visa but was doing pretty well as his SUV was so new it still had the stickers on, a big lorry whose floor I spilled my biscuits on (energy food, lived off biscuits for 2 days. I couldn't not eat anything, back in '68, it was damn hell boy) and a family who stopped without us flagging them down right on the road into Hama, about 2km from the centre. They had two daughters who both spoke English and took it upon themselves to show us around the town, quick glances at the norias for photo ops and then drove us straight to the hotel after having given our number to their brother, whose name we never quite got so just simply named "Brutha". The hotel was much more expensive than we were told, Bullshit Planet lied to us again, but we gave them a quick ultimatum of "give us 200 off or we're leaving" and they were forced into appeasement. Little did we know that we could have slept on the roof on mattresses for about a quarter of the price of the room we got. Never mind, the shower was definitely worth it - my fib of "nah the shower's shit" after having been in the bathroom for 20 minutes and emerging amongst billows of steam didn't fool BJ one bit. The TV though, not quite so worth it. Undecided about televisions, keeping up with the news is great but keeping ourselves in line is slightly difficult. So of course, with the combination of TV and tiring day travelling we had a good night in with bags of snacks - Ruby, La Vita, Ugarit cola, top stuff - and about 3 films back to back - after having watched a good installation of the Doha debates. Hurrah for Fox Movies! Brutha had phoned us asking us out for a meal but too wiped that we were, we said we'd see him the next day for a walk around the town or something. Just one full day in Hama, two nights, then down to Palmyra was the plan.

Slept in late. More TV. It's about time the Americans did something right, Health Reform bill passed, the only productive thing to come out of the day. You only get annoyed at yourself when you're not currently doing it! So we got up at about 12 and out by 1, wasting half our only day in Hama already (sorry Maddy!) and chiding ourselves once again for being such damn slobs. We spent our little time wisely, walking around the city and admiring its age, checking out the norias which weren't on the go as the water was too low and getting cheap ice cream. 6p for a standard ice cream is probably the best deal stumbled across yet. The sun was getting low so we climbed the citadel hill - the ruins were ruined in an earthquake so now there's just a park - and sat and argued until sundown about morality, ethics, meta-ethics, moral relativism, absolutism and the apparent lack of a legitimate middle ground, again stripping down the argument to its fundamentals, agreeing that we disagree on the free will / determinism issue. A sign of both a) immense philosophical strength and b) immense stubbornness all round (note to self - same thing?).

That evening we met a cool Italian backpacker - the first travellers we'd seen in so long except for two weird looking guys in Lattakia that we didn't speak to and the Germans at the beginning - and sat chatting to him for a good while. We were up until the early hours talking about Italian politics and the corruption of Burlusconi and how Italy is so right wing and so on, until BJ and I hijacked the conversation to be a complaining session of laying out our grievances about all aspects of British politics, all the parties and all the MPs, and discussing whether it would in fact be worse for Tories or Labour to get in, acknowledging at the same time that either were inevitable and both were useless, and the only other option are the Lib Dems who are not only never going to get into power but also equally useless. In fairness, he did ask about Britain, we just gave him more than he bargained for.

"Oh damn! What about Brutha?" is the concerned question I'm sure is on most people's minds at this point. Of course it wasn't on ours until the next morning when we realised that we totally blew him off. Ah, never mind.

The day after, we resolved to try and get to Palmyra rather than stay in Homs as upon passing through to Hama it didn't seem quite worth stopping for. From Hama it was about 200km there so a long old hitch it would be. We were stocked up with falafel and ready to go though, and in no time we were on a pickup which was going all the way to Homs! That is, of course, until he pulled over about 10 minutes later saying that Homs was this way, he on the other hand was going that way. Our sheer euphoria that the first lift we tried stopped and was taking us straight to Homs dissolved, but even if the lift wasn't real the feeling was real so we were still happy and raring to go. We got there in no time and again employed the 'yup, we're walking to Palmyra' policy which got us some really crazy looks ("it's 180km! Bus!") but we ended up at the right road, even if we did have to take a taxi. No-one seemed to notice, or at least if they did then they didn't point out, the massive contradiction this made to our walking story. We hiked a long way after we were dropped off and started trying, realising each time that our position wasn't good enough and walking for another half an hour or thereabouts. We finally stopped someone who told us he was going to a village about 100km towards there so we siezed upon the chance and rode with him - he gave us bananas - for a short while until the 100km was about 20 minutes and we were on the road again. Deposited outside a restaurant, the young owner tried his hardest to tell us about the buses and to go back to Homs to get a bus, whilst flagging down everything that was going the wrong way. He was totally confusing: he surely understood the concept of hitch hiking if he was flagging things down going the wrong way, and moreover we got out of a car which was going the opposite direction which then drove off. We didn't even begin trying to explain what we were intending and just walked off amidst his last minute calls to come and sit down in his restaurant, sitting down on the site of the road round the corner. This was real emptiness, one road with about one car every twenty minutes, most of whom barrelled past. We pondered the likelihood of staying the night there and decided it was moderate to good.

But then! A pickup slowed, stopped, gave us tea, stuffed us in the back and we were on the long long way to Palmyra, sitting crosslegged on boxes of Saudi tiles and sipping tea. What a fantastic ride, we were heading east so we could see the sun setting on the road behind us as we sat down, several increasingly cold hours of panoramic desolation as the desert really took hold of the land and the trees became only as infrequent as the huge rocky cliffs becane common. Passing signs to Iraq, not another person in sight for hours, days, getting dark and lying down to keep warm away from the billowing air. Arriving, the guy dropped us off at a hotel which he said was in the centre and then demanded 400 SYP. Amidst a culture of intense hospitality, when some gypsy does a thing like that it's completely unexpected and you're taken aback. You didn't tell us, we say, he didn't listen or understand or care. We ended up paying him 200 and he cackled greedily as he snatched it.