Syria

I split a taxi with a couple of guys across the border to Syria hoping travelling with locals would help smooth over the fact that I had no visa. Fortunately, counter to the guidebook insistence, the crossing was smooth with no palms required greasing. 30 cups of tea, and 200 cigarettes later I found myself in a time warp in Aleppo where I got lost in the labyrinth souq I and quickly discovered that Syria has some of the best fresh juices and street food on the planet!

From Aleppo I headed to Latakia so to experience being the least hairy guy on the beach for my first time ... even then I nearly failed in my objective. The public beach is the location of choice - women swimming with hijabs and life jackets, friendly men smoking hookahs and boys (well, men actually) peering through walls into the exclusive hotel section of the beach to catch a glimpse of the liberal lipsticked gals in bikinis. With all this I couldn't help but overlook that the beach was cut from the same cloth as Queenstown football oval and the water looked kinda like it had just been used to wash the nations clothes.

After Latakia it was on to the Crusader castle of Crac Des Chevaliers stopping overnight to check out the quaint town of Hama with its giant creaking norias (waterwheels) kind of on the way. I don't know much about castles other than: I got a cardboard cutout one for my birthday which as destroyed before I could make it (Mum ever so wisely never revealing the perpetrator), Rick had the big Lego one (spaceships was my Lego of choice), and that they generally look cool. Lawrence of Arabia probably knew a bit more so I´ll go with his description of the Crac des Chevaliers as "perhaps the best preserved and most wholly admirable castle in the world". It looks big but is deceptively huger (surely not a word, but should be). However, being holed up in a castle in the middle of a desert for a few decade sausage fest while Saladin ignores you and takes out the easier castles and the surrounding territory takes shine of a knights armour, so I used my thumb and a bus to leave for Damascus (actually, with the methods and motives for the crusades about as dubious, and successful, as Bush's war on Iraq, the shinning armour had lost its appeal a while ago).

Damascus is a city unlike any other I have visited. One of the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world, it is infused with the times it has seen. While the tourist buses, touts and modernity shout in Istanbul and the Pyramids scream in Cairo, Damascus murmurs its age through everything within its walls ... the bullet scarred souq, story telling shop owner, hammams, grand courtyards, cobble stone streets, trapezoidal buildings, narrow lanes, churches, mosques, hookahs, backgammon, dark gloves, tight jeans, Shiite pilgrims, Arabic students, smoking dens and ice cream parlours. With no big ticket items to distract (unless your a Shiite Muslim looking for the sparkliest Mosque on the planet), the city is the attraction, its wrinkled flesh more affecting and enjoyable than so many protected skeletons.

But wait, there's more! The people are friendly (as they are throughout the country), generally wondering why the hell you bothered to visit their country. And it offers fantastic food: Where else can you eat at a restaurant frequented by the popular & iconic president (whose aviator clad silhouette obscures many a car window), choose between sitting in a charming courtyard or a beautifully breezy rooftop, eat an exquisite three course meal, smoke a hookah and still get enough change from a 20 to eat almost as well from one of the variety of shopfront restaurants the following day. To top it off this particular restaurant offered its own version of "stuffed aborigines" - which were much more palatable than that dished up over the centuries by the Australian government and its constituents!

I loved Damascus, it is likely to remain favourite city of the trip, and whats more, It doesn't feel like a city about to change; so you only have to make sure you get there before you find an Israel stamp in your passport. I left Damascus wondering just how different Beirut could be.