Exploring the desert

We set off at 9pm after a delicious breakfast - I had been craving an omelette for days! Over very nice driver, Sahleh drove us back along the road to Deir ez Zur for a while before turning off and driving through a couple of Bedouin towns where all the males except the very young wore the tell-tale checkered headscarves (think Yassar Arafat) and loose fitting robes, whereas the women’s heads were all covered by headscarves. We drove out through the moonlike desert until we suddenly saw appear ahead the spectacular sight of the East Wall Palace (Qasr Hirl Sharqi).

Literally in the middle of nowhere this 8th century Umayyad palace once held a strategic position on trading routes to Mesopotamia and was inhabited up until the 14th century. The enormous walls have been partially restored and there are some beautiful arches standing inside the main entrance. The whole complex and its once lush gardens used to be supplied by an underground spring about 30km away. The Bedu caretaker opened the main gates for us and after we had looked around and the only two other tourists who had made it this far into the land of nowhere had also left we dropped him off at a village nearby as he seemed not to be expecting anyone else.

Then we drove off-road through the desert surrounded by low barren peaks until we arrived at a small Bedouin village. Sahleh went to speak to his aunt (who he hadn’t seen for 15 years) and she invited us in for tea and served us a lunch of fried aubergine, goats cheese, chips, bread and goats milk. It was all very tasty. We chatted about history and politics and found Sahleh to be willing to discuss Syrian politics a lot more than anyone else I had met, perhaps given the fact we were really out in the middle of nowhere. When it was time to leave we asked Sahleh should we leave a tip and he said “No. For a Bedouin this would be an insult to their hospitality”.

We drove back to Palmyra and the last part of the drive was the most beautiful with some sharply defined peaks and a dried up lake at its foot. An ideal place to set up a Bedouin tent for a night in the desert, something I had been thinking about for our groups. We drove back to Palmyra, said goodbye to Sahleh and met with another Bedouin, Fuaz who brought us out to his families Bedouin tent in the desert near Palmyra and we spent the night Bedouin-style on very comfortable mattresses under warm blankets, and awoke to the sound of camels (about 50 of them), sheep and donkeys pottering around just outside our tent. Fuaz dropped us back to town and myself and London David said goodbye as he was going to Hama and I got on the bus back to Damascus. I have a couple of days worth of errands and meetings here before I will head into Lebanon. Next stop: Beirut.

- David