Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
As we had arrived quite late the previous night, and had not had time to spend in the ruins
before catching the sunset, we took a brief tour (without Abdulla) round the main sites. We
had not seen the Valley of Towers the previous day as they were already closed for visitors
when we arrived, but we managed to be the first visitors of the day and view the curious
burial towers.
We also saw the famous temple of Bel (the same God as the one in Baalbek Lebanon, not
so far away), which had previously had a top made of gold and which must have been spec-
tacular for the ancient caravans of traders to see, as they approached the city at the end
of their long and hazardous journeys. The Temple of Bel had been used for sacrifices to
the God of fertility. In the past, worshippers had walked round the perimeter seven times
before sacrificing animals. Sadly, this temple is one of the six UNESCO World Heritage
Sites, which have been damaged during the recent and continuing civil war in Syria.
As we had a long day ahead of us, we finished our tour of the ruins of Palmyra and by
09:30 a.m., we were already on the road, heading for Krak and Tartus.
Peter and I had spoken about Abdulla's utter unsuitability to be a guide. He had no training,
no cultural awareness, no social awareness and was not interested in the job, the history
of the country, or his customers (except, perhaps for what extra money he could get out of
them). He illustrated this by telling us how he had once made $500 from a group of Japan-
ese tourists in one day, brazenly dropping broad hints to us. He was a market trader by pro-
fession and instinct. His broken English was good only for primitive transactions and chat-
up lines. He was quite affable (in keeping with my request to Raffa to have guides with a
sense of humour). Unfortunately, he used up his only joke at the very start of the journey,
and that had been of very questionable taste. It half worked but that, unfortunately, was all
he had in his humour reserves and that was his last attempt to humour us. Such was Ab-
dulla's ignorance, that each question we posed about the history of Syria, buildings, parks,
statues, villages, cities or people was met with the standard answer; “Could be”, “Might
be”, “Perhaps” or “Maybe”. At first, we laughed, then, as the repetitiveness of his non-an-
swers became more persistent and frustrating, we completely gave up asking him anything
and remained guideless in all but name and left to our own resources.
Unfortunately, we were due to be stuck with Abdulla for almost 3 days and we just had to
put up with it. One day had actually been more than enough in his company as we had seen
through his charade very quickly. By our second day, therefore, Peter and I had decided to
see if Abdulla would offer any information to us without our prompting. As we knew the
answer before we began this game, it was quite predictable, but it was still spectacular to
realize the overwhelming extent to which our suspicions were realized. He began the day
by falling asleep in the mini-van for most of the journey. This allowed me to speak freely
