Palmyra – can we stay an extra
day, please?
Obviously, the bus becomes a
(really) mini-van, and here we go, squeezing in and slowly melting with 13
other people, all staring at us “very discreetly”, including a not so discreet
little girl and full on Bedouin man in
full desert gear.
At least, in my country, they
will ask you if you want the tour “with or without emotion?” If you’ve ever
been to Natal, in Brazil, you’ll know what I mean (if you haven’t, it refers to
riding a buggy on the sand dunes). We
got our bit of emotion whether we wanted it or not. The driver makes a pit stop
(we are on a busy highway, crossing the desert, ok?) and “forgets to pull on the
hand-brake”. So, we slowly and
driverless, drift towards a busy highway, everyone in the mini-van screaming,
till one of the guys jumps out of the moving car (our hero) and pulls on the
handbrake. Then we all started laughing
and, on cue, the Bedouin looks at us and says “welcome to Syria”. We all laugh
nervously, enough emotion for a day?
We got to Palmyra in the evening
and guess what? The place is AMAZING,
the hotel is the best one since Naxos (Greece), and of course, we decided to
stay another night. We slept so well,
breakfast is nice and light Bedouin style (yoghurt, fresh apricot jam, cheese,
butter, olive oil, zataar, flat bread and nice tea), and we are off to explore
the AWESOME ruins and the Oasis (yeah, a real OASIS). It’s such a wonderful place; please see the
25000 photos we took of Palmyra, just in case you don’t believe us. Highly
recommended.
Ah, forgot to mention, they don’t
have Facebook in Syria, it’s totally blocked, the rest of the internet stuff is
fine otherwise.
Wait, there’s more… and it’s all
good! We decided to go back to the ruins
for sunset as we were told the lighting is fantastic, and guess what? It really is amazing. I bought a Bedouin style scarf in Aleppo and
Paul decides to confiscate it. He asks
me to wrap it around his head for him and I do my best but obviously it’s crap.
We are walking around when Camel Khaled
and some other Bedouins come by on
camels. They ask if we want a camel ride, no thanks and we ask if we can take
photos. During the “photo shoot”, Khaled laughs at the way Paul’s scarf. After blaming the wife, the guy said it would
take me 1000 years to learn how to do it and says “I’ll teach you”. And so he does, and it’s such a nice moment, we
are both really moved by the whole thing. Even the photos kind of translate the moment very
nicely. Later on, we keep on meeting the guy everywhere and he yells from his
bike “Brazilians”, every time he sees us around. So we decide to go back to the
hotel and pick up one of our Brazilian football T-shirts and give it to him. Can we please stay another day, I ask? No, moving on to Damascus.
