Day 24 - Aleppo

This morning Leah is at 80%, so we think we can visit Farhad's house, and hopefully leave for some adventures outside of Aleppo tomorrow. Today is Friday, the Muslim holy day so many of Aleppo's shops are closed so when Farhad and Leila arrive we go check out the train times to get to Turkey, and explore the city a bit more. As Friday is a holiday everyone is outside enjoying the warm night air. It seems like there must be a festival happening with families eating ice-cream in the dim light of the park lights but Farhad assures me that this is an ordinary Friday night.

In the evening we slept at Farhad's house, a large ground floor apartment. We stayed up late talking about travel plans and laughing about our experiences so far.

Day 23 - Aleppo

This morning Leah had some serious stomach pains and general sickness - but since we ate a variety of suspect food the night before we're not able to nail down the culprit. Thankfully I am fine so Leah just laid up in bed all day.

I met a Tunisian/Belgian man that morning and we walked for lunch. I led him to the restaurant where Leah, Leila and I had so much fun and enjoyed the food but for some reason he was really miserable about the whole thing and was quite rude to the staff. I made a mental note not to become friends with this man, but he is to lead me to an ancient medical/mental hospital museum so I can't extricate myself just yet.

The hospital is very peaceful, and it is full of descriptions of historical Arabic scientists and philosophers. They have quite a few examples of early medical tools, but without descriptions in English or Arabic we can only guess at what some of the pieces are for. The corridors are very high and narrow, and despite the brutal heat outside the air here is cool and comfortable.

By the afternoon Leah is feeling 50% better, so this is good news. I have a few beers with an Englishman, and Dane and the Tunisian and we talked about politics, travelling and pretty much everything.

Day 22 - Aleppo

We were planning to meet with Leila today, but as luck would have it she had some food poisoning so we were without our fun guide for a couple of days. Nonetheless she dragged herself to our hotel and aimed us at the Christian district to explore, and then went home herself for rest.

Leah and I wandered around old churches and through markets but this only takes a couple of hours, and without a guidebook we don't know what we're missing down the narrow streets. We walked to a huge park and relaxed on a bench, but somehow as we left the park an 8 year-old boy started to follow us from here. Everytime we turned a corner he was right there, 3 meters behind us. When we would stop suddenly he would either stop right beside us, or continue for about 3m past us and pretend to look into a shop window. Eventually we get back to the Christian district and we bought some ice-cream for ourselves. The kid sat at a bench about 10m from us, but before long he has moved to a bench right beside us.

To me, this means this is no longer some secret agent game - he is angling for some kind of attention from us. Instead of giving in I decide to outsmart him and we lose our shadow in a crowd of tourists. A few tiny alleys later and we've lost him - I win the game!

Lots more aimless wandering around Aleppo and that is our day. But all the time we keep looking back, thinking that we heard the shuffling feel of that kid.

Day 21 - Aleppo (Halep)

The Turkcell SIM card I have bought isn't working here, I guess the card isn't allowed to roam in Syria so we're just making due with our Canadian roaming plans.

Leila joined us in the morning and we walked to the Omyiad Mosque. Leah and Leila have to wear funny robes but as I'm a man I'm okay with pants and a T-shirt. In our bare feet the stone floor is really hot from the sun, and we try to avoid the hotter black stones. The mosque sports an unusual square minaret at one corner, and some sections of the mosque are closed to either men or women. Of course I blunder and am pushed away from the Ladies hall. We actually get to see the man singing the call to prayer, which is neat as this is usually blared out of loudspeakers on the minarets, but we never knew if it was a person or a recording.

Later we walked through the markets, and we're all immersed in the smells and sights of the place. We pop out into bright sunlight and we're at the Citadel, a huge Muslim castle. It has a huge moat, sloping walls pierced with narrow vertical windows for archer placements, and a long and narrow entry bridge into the castle.


The castle door is at 90 degrees to the bridge, a defensive measure to make it difficult for elephants to bash in the doors. Above are round holes in the roof, apparently portals to pour boiling oil on attackers. Many narrow windows line the walls, flat to the outside but apses on the inside to protect the archers, but also allow them a wide range of attack.

Once through the citadel walls things get more jumbled. Leila explains that there are so many layers of history buried here that in some places archeologists are unwilling to destroy valuable upper layers to expose the lower layers. We're in the sun again at the top of the castle and we stop for water at a little cafe. From here we relax and look out upon massive Aleppo, its name comes from the white stone that makes up most of its building material, and you can really see it as the city stretches for miles and miles from up here on the Citadel.

We go inside the castle walls again at stumble upon a very impressive royal chamber, with very beautiful and intricate woodwork. I say we stumbled upon it as there is no signage, and another couple we met actually missed this section entirely. We follow what was once a secret passage for the royals into a defensive chamber above the main entry hall. Here we can look down through holes into the hall, holes through which boiling oil may once have passed.

We eat a late lunch/early dinner with Leila and puff away on the nargileh (water pipe, or hubbly bubbly in the Aleppo tourist lingo).

Day 20 - Syria?

Today we plan to enter Syria, but without visas we know that there is a chance we will not be allowed to enter. If this happens, we will go to Gaziantep because there is a Syrian consulate there that might give us a visa, but right now we think our best bet is to go to the border as some people have been successful this way.

Before we leave, we visit the Hatay Archeological Museum. There is a lovely white marble sarcophagus here, and the preserved/restored bones of a man, a woman and a young girl. The museum has a huge collection of beautiful mosaics, some are so finely crafted they actually look like paintings from a distance.

So now we want to go to Syria. We get our bags from the hotel, and sweat our way to the dolmus stand to Reyhanli, a Turkish border town that doesn't have much to captivate a traveller. From there, we pay a dolmus driver 20 Lira to drop us off at the Turkish border. Now we get an offer from a taxi driver to take us to Aleppo for $100, but this seems steep to us. We think there must be a bus, or dolmus or at least a cheaper taxi at the Syrian border so we decide to walk. As the Turkish border guard stamps our passports he tells us it is 5km to the Syrian border crossing, but now it is too late to go back as he has already stamped us. So on we go in the baking sun.

At least our water bottles are full, we start walking. At about the halfway point a truck driver feels sorry for us and takes us the rest of the way to the Syrian border where we jump out. A guard directs us to an administration building a few hundred meters away. The heat is stifling.

When we enter we are relieved to be out of the sun, and we mentally prepare ourselves with our plan to get visas. The official rule is that if Syria has an embassy in your country, you're supposed to get your visa there - since Canada does have a Syrian embassy in Ottawa we're prepared for this eventuality. We plan to explain that Ottawa is very far from Vancouver, and we also have a letter from Leah's Syrian friend inviting us to Syria and a photocopy of his passport; but we will only use these tactics as a last resort - our primary plan is to just ask and be polite and hope they don't notice we're Canadian.

We're not looking forward to walking back to Turkey if we're knocked back from Syria. At the counter we are directed to a side office but when we arrive there is a big scene, and two men are led out in handcuffs. We hope we don't share their fate. After sitting in the room for a few minutes they shuffle us out into the foyer again and we're told 'six'! We don't know what this means, six minutes, six hours? Six o'clock, or are we 6th in line? We do as we're told and we sit down on a bench to wait.

After an hour and a half, six o'clock is approaching. Many men have come and left, some shouting, some pacing and many plain-clothes men going in and out of the offices. I talked to a Turkish man who was also awaiting a Syrian visa, and he assures me that soon it will be time; but he has no room in his truck for us to get to Aleppo.

Finally around 6.30pm the Turk and I enter the office again and we make our applications. I hand over our passports, and give the names of our parents, then we're instructed to pay so we run down the hallway to pay our $56 each and we run back to the visa counter with the receipt to get our stamps. We're questioned in more detail about our jobs, and where we are staying in Aleppo. We say we're staying with our friend Farhad, and the customs agent has the same last name! He thought that was very funny, and when customs people are happy I'm happy.

With visas in hand we can now give some more thought to how to get 100km to Aleppo. As we approach the baggage inspection area a stone-faced Syrian man holds up his hand and says (shouts) 'Open ze bags!'. So we put our bags down on the stone bench and open then, and almost immediately we hear 'Close ze bags!'.

Here is a video of the border guards!

And so begins the next two hours, quite possibly the most fun I've ever had at a border crossing. Our predicament is that there aren't any major towns between the border and Aleppo (a city of 7 million) and this is 100km away. There is only one bus a day that runs in the morning. We're still hopeful (hope is all we have at this point) that we can catch a ride with someone or a taxi somehow, so instead of rushing things we just sit down and have tea, coffee and laughs with the border guards. They give us our first few Arabic words, and around 9pm they find someone who is driving to Aleppo for us.

Some memorable moments are the moustacioed Abu Faris, his facial hair the butt of some gentle ribbing. We talk about Canada and try to describe how huge it is - this is probably difficult for Syrians to imagine as they can drive across their country in 5 or 6 hours.

Almost hilariously to us, the driver picks us up and then stops about 100m past the border, gets out and leaves us there for about ten minutes only to return with two more people for Aleppo. Finally in Aleppo we meet Leila, and she takes us for dinner and to our hotel.

Day 19 - Hatay

Today we plan to leave Urfa for Hatay, to position ourselves for crossing the border into Syria. As we're exploring we bump into Ali and Onur (our Kurdish Urfa friends) and they join us on an excusion to buy bus tickets, and then to buy a fancy nargila (water pipe). We grab a 4pm bus and arrive in Hatay at 10pm.

Day 18 - Urfa

We walked to the prophet Abraham's cave, where he was born and spent the first 7 years of his life. Apparently King Nimrod feared he would eventually be usurped by one who was newly born had all babies in the region killed. This was not very rewarding, and a little uncomfortable for us as it is an active place of worship for Muslims, so there were many many people jammed into this tiny space as we both felt (separately as men and women have different viewing rooms) very out of place. You don't actually enter the cave, but a tiny room with a window into the greenly lit cave. The little room has a tiny door that essentially forces you to bow as you enter, and some of the men will back away through the door as they leave, apparently so as not to show their backside to the prophet Abraham's birthplace.

We climbed the stairs to the Kale (citadel, or castle) in the burning sun. There is a fantastic view of Urfa at the top, but only two huge columns remain of the citadel interior. Everything else is buried under centuries of silt and ancient rubble. Once again we are struck that so much of Turkey's history is still hidden beneath tonnes of dirt!

We decide to catch a dolmus to Harran, an ancient madrasa - the University of the ancient world. We were able to check out the mosque only from behind a fence, due to archaeological excavations, but I have to respect this. So little of Turkey actually gets excavated that when they finally get to it I think it is a big deal.

There are some traditional 'bee-hive' houses that are still maintained for tourists, although modern life has the locals in the usual square houses. These bee-hive shaped houses are built in rows, with each little bee-hive having a door to the next chamber. The conical tops allow warm air to escape through a hole right at the peak so despite the beating sun outside it is cool and refreshing inside.

Harran also has a big citadel, and it looks like they're preparing an excavation project here too as they have just erected a fence to keep the goats out, but thankfully we're able to go in there and explore.