Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
“Reading, researching, deciding the itinerary, getting in the mood.”
Holiday -2
The last few days were spent planning an itinerary for the trip. I based the plans on a guide-
book and from information culled from various internet sites; cutting pasting, personalizing,
re-writing and reorganizing all the pieces. I had found a very useful travel blog from Carol
Miller, a regular contributor to
www.syriagate.com
and I used a lot of the excellent advice it
contained to formulate my travel plans.
Then Peter, who had entrusted all the planning to me up to this point, realized that I was
being over-optimistic and unrealistic about the itinerary and the distances to cover each day.
He suggested we cut out some of the excessively ambitions parts and so I put together a
shorter (by 500k) route. It still meant that we would be driving 1,000 kilometers in 6 days,
but it was less exhausting (a few years later, without Peter to advise me, I covered 1,000
kilometers in one day in Libya; but that is a different story).
I had half a dozen books on the kitchen table that I had read in preparation for my trip in-
cluding:
• The Crossing Place - Philip Marsden
• From the Holy Mountain - William Dalrymple
• The Middle East on a Shoestring - Lonely Planet
• The 8.55 to Baghdad - Andrew Eames
• The Templers - Piers Paul Read
I used the topics and my internet research to put together an itinerary, which 8,244 words
later emerged as a 21 page plan for our 6 day stay. It felt like an MBA assignment, except it
was much longer. It was also much more fun (and it was collated from a variety of internet
sources and tour company package offerings).
In the evening, I settled an upset stomach with a few glasses of port and started to watch
Syrian TV to get myself in the mood. There was a soap opera with lots of men in moustaches
(many obviously and unashamedly false). Phil and I turned the sound down on the television
and provided instantaneous and spontaneous translations of the dialogue (a lot was quite
rude) much to our mutual amusement.
