Day 13 – Thursday 9th April 09 – Palmyra to Damascus

We rose at 5.30 to catch the morning light over The Valley of Tombs. It was a lovely light and a great time out together. Tim & Matt had lots of fun doing things that would be banned anywhere else like climbing multi- storey tomb towers with broken and incomplete stone staircases and looking into graves where hundreds of human remains still lay - mostly of children and young people. I found this very moving and wrote a reflection on the experience.

We built a mini-cairn on a rock and tried to take turns to knock it over. Matthew perfected a Neanderthal lob complete with obligatory grunt. It was a ‘Not Very Accurate Technique’ and helped us understand why the Neanderthals might have died out. It also reminded use how much I miss Matthew's humour which ranges from the sublime to the ridiculous and is so often a wonderfully healing gift for Tim when he is feeling overwhelmed.

The hotel breakfast was on the meagre side so we asked for some more bread. A single flatbread was cut up and brought over by hand (no plate or serviette). I hoped his hands were clean. When I saw him a few minutes later with his finger deep inside his nostril I decided it was probably a faint hope.

After breakfast we got a taxi to the bus station. There was a new bus service that went directly to Damascus without stopping and it went from an otherwise indistinguishable café so the taxi driver dropped us there and we waited till the coach came. The journey was uneventful for the first 10 miles into the desert then the coach broke down. It wasn’t reassuring to see the driver look despairingly through lockers trying to find any kind of tool. He failed. Some people got out to look at the engine and will it back to life but apart from the enjoyment of speculation the will power technique was unsuccessful. At some point the driver managed to flag down another bus and borrow their tools. I wandered off the roadside to look for arrowheads and axes in the abundance of flint on the desert surface. After 30 or 40 minutes the engine roared back to life and everyone piled back in. I regarded the whole breakdown with a frisson of excitement - some kind of death defying adventure with the possibility of being stranded in the desert hallucinating over imaginary water holes but I was speaking to Madeline later and she breezily said ‘Oh the coaches regularly break down in the desert – I’ve rarely caught one that didn’t’.

It was a very long day having been up since 5.30 but we knew we had not yet met Marzan, Matthew's Arabic teacher who had been instrumental in putting him in ontact with Gabe and Theresa. When Matthew phoned him he insisted he cook something for us that evening so despite the long day and a tired Tim we set off across Damascus for a late evening meal. It seemed the sort of house where there was some unwritten rule about eating alone and before long there were 9 people round the table. Fortunately for us English was the common language of communication and conversations ranged far and wide from the health (or otherwise) of Middle Eastern rivers to the nature of Palestinian identity and the mythological creatures in Arabic storytelling... all lubricated with excellent food.