Bananas Don't Travel Well

eroded pillarAfter Damascus, we moved on to Palmyra, an ancient caravan city in the Syrian desert. We spent two nights there, managed to get up at 4:30 to watch the sun rise over the ruins, and then, together with a "Denwegian" couple (she is Danish, he's Norwegian), embarked on an epic day trip to central Syria's sights with the talented Khaled Ayoubi in his 1977 Pugeot 304.

Palmyra and the desert

Palmyra with fortressPalmyra is situated in the largest oasis in Syria, where thousands of date palms are still cultivated (hence its name). The ancient city dates to about the first century AD. Although it was a protectorate of Rome, it was not Roman but a buffer state between the Roman and Persian empires. The city's architecture is therefore a fusion of Roman, Mesopotamian and native Syrian styles.

Palmyra derived extraordinary wealth from taxing Silk Road caravans, and its citizens funded the construction of ostentatious temples and tombs. When Petra's influence waned, Palmyra's grew. Unlike Petra, it did not lie on a natural caravan route; trade would have more obviously followed the Euphrates from Baghdad to Antioch (Antakya in present-day Turkey). But the Palmyrenes made a point of stationing trade missions in strategic places, such as Baghdad and the Persian Gulf, that made sure the caravans passed through Palmyra. But the good times only lasted a few centuries. The power-hungry (and reputedly beautiful) queen Zenobia made a play for Rome that led to its sacking by Roman generals.

dawn with ZenobiaThe ruins, in their desert setting, complete with a twelfth-century Arab fortress overlooking them, are quite spectacular, particularly at sunrise and sunset. (The 40+ degree heat would detract from their appreciation in the middle of the day anyways.) Like most of the Eastern Roman-era cities, Palmyra's main streets were colonnaded. The columns supported a roof, creating a covered street, with shops on either side. The scale is impressive: Palmyra's main street is 1.2 km long, and is flanked by temples, baths, a theatre, etc, in various states of ruin. At one end is the huge Temple of Bel, which was financed by a single wealthy merchant.

Unlike the ruins of Egypt and at Petra, there were very few tourists at Palmyra (or, for that matter, at any of the Syrian sights). At sunrise, we had only Hussein Al-Shael, with his two camels—Zenobia (his favorite, for her soft white fur and good disposition) and also his fastest camel (whose name escapes me but he had won this year's camel race)—for company. He, like most Bedouin we have met, had a genuine coolness and dignity about him. Though he did offer to sell us a camel ride, he was very low key about it, and we had the impression he was really out there to watch the sunrise, not to drum up business.

Beginning an epic day

Krak des ChevaliersWe met Birgitte and Andreas in Palmyra. They had met a few years ago while working for an NGO in the West Bank, and were on a return trip to see friends in Palestine and do some traveling in Syria and Jordan. When, after sharing a couple of Bedouin meals and endless cups of tea, Birgitte and Andreas hired a car and driver for a whirlwind tour around central Syria, we opted to share the trip with them.

We left Palmyra in Khaled's adorable (but none too comfy) car at 6am. Our first stop was Krak des Chevaliers, a Crusader castle that guarded a pass in the coastal mountains. It is one of the largest, most impressive, and best preserved of the castles built by the Crusaders to keep the route to the Holy Land clear to Christian traffic. We spent a couple of hours exploring it.

joining inAfterward, we had tea in an adjacent cafe, and Khaled brought out his oud, or lute, and played folk songs. Word got out, and locals came by to clap and join in the singing. This was truly one of the day's highlights.

We next made a quick stop in Hama, where we checked into our hotel, dropped off our bags, and then drove to a restaurant where Khaled ordered takeout kebabs, hummous, babaganoush and salad. While it was being prepared, he drove off to buy some grease for a problematic axle, the first sign that not all was right with his car...

By mid-afternoon, we were getting pretty hungry, so we stopped at a roadside restaurant to eat our lunch. From there, we turned off the main road, and pulled into a garage to fix Khaled's axle. The grease-smeared family that ran the garage were enthused to have four foreigners stop by and insisted on posing for pictures. By this time it was getting to be late afternoon and we were wondering if we'd have time to make all our stops. But they finished the job and we were on the road again within half an hour.

The dead cities

SerjillaFrom here on, our driver's directional confidence waned considerably. He stopped several times to ask the way and more than once he had to back up and try again. But we eventually made it to Serjilla, one of the thousand or so “dead cities”: Byzantine-era towns abandoned to the elements and, for me, the highlight of the day, if not all of Syria.

The dead cities are unique among Roman/Byzantine ruins in that common people's homes were built of stone (rather than wood or mud) and entire towns, not just public works such as temples, forums and theatres, can be seen today. Along with Pompeii, it is one of the few concrete examples of how normal people lived. Although the ruins are from the Byzantine period (the second Roman empire, ruled from Constantinople), archaeologists believe that, apart from the presence of churches rather than temples, the towns would have been largely unchanged from earlier Roman times.

When we visited Serjilla, the sun was getting low in the sky, casting a warm glow over the rocks, and as we had the place to ourselves it was very quiet and peaceful. The town is set on the banks of a small stream, with houses, churches, olive presses, animal feeding troughs, underground warehouses, a two-story tavern, and a bathhouse all still discernible. Unlike Palmyra, the buildings were relatively simply adorned, with the odd cross or emblem on a door lintel. Olive trees are still cultivated nearby, although the land is bleached out with literally thousands of rocks exposed to the elements (one theory for the abandonment of the dead cities is soil exhaustion, combined with a drying up in the market for olive oil, the towns' principal product). More than any of the more grandiose Roman ruins, there was a real feeling of history here. It wasn't difficult to imagine life here, over 1500 years ago, being not too far different from any small town today. In fact, it reminded me a lot of the villages we'd seen recently in Portugal.

More rocks: Apamea

portico at duskAfter some more navigational adventures, we visited another of the dead cities, not far down the road from Serjilla. This one was more ruined, but was surrounded by a modern-day village (built in large part from stones scavenged from the Byzantine town), and contained an interesting “pyramid tomb.”

The sun was getting really low in the sky as we set out for our final stop: the ruined Greek (and later Roman) city of Apamea. Once again, Khaled had to ask for directions several times before we found the right road, but it was an interesting drive through rural and small-town Syrian. Although we got there all of five minutes before sunset, the site is on top of a hill, and the sun sets behind the mountains on the opposite side of the Orontes river valley (the northernmost portion of the African rift valley system). This means that there is a full hour of light after the sun sets, so we had ample time to walk the city's colonnaded street and explore some of the ruins flanking it.

Here too, we had the place to ourselves: mass tourism has yet to reach Syria. The dusky light made the place really atmospheric, and in the end we were hard-pressed to decide which was more impressive: Palmyra or Apamea. I think my vote goes to Apamea. Its scale is quite incredible—the colonnaded street is paved with massive stones and is considerably longer than at Palmyra—and though less effort has been made to excavate the surrounding ruins, the city walls indicate that a vast area of grass-covered hills are actually the buried remains of buildings. Amazing that such a large area has not yet been excavated and studied (although treasure-hunters have surely done their work here).

Khaled and his PugeotWe got back to Hama around 10pm, thoroughly exhausted. The heat that day was pretty intense, and Khaled's car was not air conditioned. We ended up spending three days recuperating in Hama, a quiet town whose main attraction is its ancient wooden waterwheels built to raise water into aqueducts and which are still operational today, before moving on to Aleppo.