Leaving Aleppo's Citadel, we were struck by the cleanliness and newness of the precinct. It is part of the rejuvenation of the city. Unlike Damascus, Aleppo has a dynamic mayor who is determined to modernize his city while also preserving what is valuable from the past. Some fine, modern hotels have opened up, and traffic congestion is being eased by road widening. The place has a vibrant air.
The arches on the right led into a glorious souk. We spent the best part of the afternoon and the morning of the following day wandering in wonder through a wealth such as it is difficult to describe. It was also incredibly busy. A crush of people coming and going eventually spat us out onto the streets through the original walls of the city.
A good museum, with lots of artefacts from the ancient sites, but No Photographs everywhere. Then we found our way into the old quarter, and had a great dinner in a truly wonderful restaurant. Again, we were struck by the excellence of the food, fresh ingredients, well prepared and served, and with a wide range of new and interesting flavours to restore the travellers.
The next day we were off, south to Hama and Homs then east across the desert to Palmyra. The great north-south road had its moments - probably the wildest was when there were three cars abreast (on a two-lane highway) and a motorbike appeared travelling the wrong way up the emergency lane. Then a lorry cut across the road and also headed up the emergency lane the wrong way in order to turn down a farm road. There wasn't room for the motorcycle to pass between us and the lorry, so he headed for the tiny gap between us and the car overtaking us. As he shot through the gap with millimetres to spare I counted five people on the machine - one child on the tank in front of father, mother riding pillion and feeding an infant, and a third child behind his mother, apparently standing on the exhaust. Crash helmets? There was no room!
The road from Homs to Palmyra crossed Real Desert, grey-white and dusty, and we got lost and had to read Arabic signs to find our way. Fortunately our guidebook had place names in Arabic, and after haggling whether it was that word which had the two squiggles in the middle or that one, we managed to get there. Life is not made any easier by the variety of orthography of Arabic.
In the strange desert light of the late afternoon, when the dust turns the sunlight to grey, the view from our hotel room was ‘interesting.’ Looming over the palmery was the huge Sanctuary of Baal, built over the period 0 to 120AD.
Further west, there were Roman ruins and strange towers on the hillside, which we later found out were tower graves.
Yes, that really is the sun, struggling to find its way through the dust that seemed to be everywhere! We went to bed, excited at the prospect of exploring the site the next day.
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