Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Next was Hama, which is famous for its wooden water wheels, which reputedly go back to
Roman times. Hama is where the men from the chocolate shop and the flower shop next to
my house in Dubai came from and they were very happy to see the photographs of my visit
there. It was also the place, where an uprising of the Moslem Brotherhood was savagely
put down in 1982 by Hafez Al-Assad.
There was a large working water wheel in the town. The young boys of the town would
climb onto the moving and rising paddles; go up to a precarious height, beyond which there
was the point of no return. They would then jump into the water below risking all kinds of
grievous injury and usually emerged smiling and laughing from the thrill of the completed
dare. It did not look safe at all and would have contravened all sensible health and safety
regulations. I suppose it was the closest that many of them got to a water fun park and it
reminded me of the equally daring and mad cliff divers from Beirut.
We then went south via the outskirts of Homs and the lush Orontes valley and veered East
along the more hostile desert landscape towards Palmyra. The sign for Deir Ezzor was a
reminder of the site of a notorious massacre of Armenians back in 1915, which Robert Fisk
investigated on his BBC documentary; “The Forgotten Genocide”, which can be found on
You Tube.
The desert road to Palmyra
