Stamp Collection

I'm no frequent flyer - the kind now epitomised/immortalised by the George Clooney character in the wonderful film 'Up in the Air' - but I've managed to accumulate a respectable amount of mileages in the last dozen years or so, both on land and in the air. About a week ago I ended up going through Immigrations of three countries, quite a few times in total, in a matter of three days (Thursday morning: London-Berlin; Thursday evening: Berlin-London; Friday afternoon: London-Paris; Sunday evening: Paris-London). Each one of these border crossings consisted no more than a few seconds of casual examination of the photo page of my UK passport, and had the IRIS machine not broken down at Heathrow Terminal One the crossing there would have involved even less - well, basically no - human contact.

As I retrieved my passport from the impeccably professional German immigration officer (isn't it wonderful that, right from these first glimpses of a nation, people do absolutely live up to their bestowed national cliches?) at Tegel airport, though, a thought took hold. It was with a big, pragmatic sigh of relief that I welcomed the day I became a British citizen. Finally, here it was: the end to interminable queueing and waiting at every European airport, to the forced absence of spontaneous trip-making (to those of you who've never had to apply for a Schengen e.g. European visa: the whole process is quite a lot lengthier than you'd imagine), and to whole days wasted at the Mayfair fortress otherwise known as the US Embassy (again, the process of going through a US visa application, even for the briefest visits, is worth a few pages in itself). I would have had every intention to retain my original, honourable nationality had the travel restrictions it carried not created so many practical problems for someone who genuinely needs to travel lot. Pragmatism usually scores high on my list of human virtues, and in this instance it certainly was no exception.

But I guess every 'progress' (for want of a better word to befit the situation) has its pitfall. Just like an online photo album that, for all its convenience, cannot quite replicate the sense of holding a physical album in your hands, or the world's best social portals that would never match the excitement of finding a hand-written letter in the letterbox unexpectedly, the border-friendly UK passport meant that a good part of our stamp collection would henceforth no longer exist.

The collection, of course, consists of visas for countries (which, as a travelling Chinese, we had to apply for in order to get into more or less any country on earth other than China itself), and entry and exit stamps received at each border crossing. The physical space these took on both our passports meant that we always had to have them renewed much sooner than the official expiry date was to be. Over the years, they've piqued the curiosity of more than one Immigration officer, usually at the borders of countries where, presumably, they don't see a lot of Clooney-esque Chinese (his character, not him) passing by that often. Several years ago, at the Finland-Russia border check on our train from Helsinki to St Petersburg, the young pair of guards held on to our passports for abnormally close (read: back to back) scrutiny, for a full ten minutes. It was only on reflection did we realise that they might never have seen such a bountiful collection of visa stamps in any passports before - the Europeans wouldn't need them, and the Chinese that would have popped up in their line of work weren't as travel-mad as we were.

Again in retrospect, I think I did always take pride in presenting my passport at countless immigration booths - not out of nationalism, but out of the universal identity-pride of indefatigable travellers. The physical evidence was there - every flight, every train ride, every transit - and became the perfect reminder that being on the road was not just a state of mind, a kind of nice idealism, but something fully tangible that involved someone validating your movements at each and every border crossing. It involved, unintentionally, building up a stamp collection.

I'm not the type of traveller who meticulously keeps train tickets and boarding pass stubs, and my record of our travels by way of written and photo journals is far from complete. The little pile of stamp-filled Chinese passports between us really was the only perfect, detailed record of our first decade of travelling together. This might no longer exist in the same form, but hopefully our border-friendly British passports will in time be filled with a brand new stamp collection soon enough - after all, there are enough unusual corners of the world where they don't open their doors to Britons that easily. What was it again they said about off the beaten track?

10 Unforgettable Travel Moments (so far) - Part III

#5: The Moment of (Dream) Childhood Revisited
Disneyland, Paris
August 1999

When we arrived in Disneyland Europe, on Day Four of our great Inter-railing trip, I was twenty-one years old and a bit. A real adult, in other words. Even though I had lived in the UK for two years by this point and had got quite fairly accustomed to the way of life here during this time, the maiden voyage to the Continent – the word immediately implying a vast body of land separate from the snug British Isles, at the other end of which lay my true home – still offered up that unique sense of thrill. And the first three days in Paris had been filled with proper, adult itineraries – the museums, the neighbourhoods, the cafes. I had looked forward to the Disneyland trip as a belated childhood treat, but not anticipated any great excitement about it. Thanks to the ‘reform and opening up’ policy of the Chinese government, my generation – the first single-child generation – had been fed on a TV diet of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, though limited to thirty minutes every week, usually on a tiny black-and-white TV screen. The world of Disney was, for the Chinese population of 1980s at large, one of many a gateway that had all of a sudden appeared, to the exciting land that was the materialist, Capitalist Western world. But those of us under twelve, we were utterly oblivious to the ideological significance of those characters at this crucial time in our nation's history. We simply adored them – all voice-dubbed in Chinese – as much as our American counterparts, and the scarcity of their appearance made any virtual encounter with them all the more precious.

We joined the expectant crowd for the daily parade down the central boulevard, and when the ‘magical world of Disney’ soundtrack sprang into life, with the full cast of fantasy characters emerging in their impeccable costumes, my eyes inexplicably welled up (to my great annoyance). In this moment, what had all those years ago existed as the Other, distant, fantastic but alien world, decidedly out of reach except on TV screens, was finally reborn as part of My world. I was there, Minnie Mouse was smiling and waving to me, and this whole surrounding – in 3D, complete with soundtrack – was no longer Myth but a cultural discourse of which I could claim participatory experience, complete with heat and sweat. The dreamland, right there and then, dusted off that dizzying, alluring aura, and entered the diary as just another memorable destination – even for a twenty-one-year-old.


#4: The Moment of Charmed Arrival
Levoca, Slovakia
April 2000

Unlike some of the other off-beat destinations where we’ve left our footprints over the last 12 years, this one hasn’t become the Hot Spot on any Frequent Traveller’s Map, and probably never will be. But this quaint, enchanting little town in north-east Slovakia will forever retain a special place in our hearts, in part thanks to the unexpectedly ‘grand’ hotel where we ended up – well, to be precise, the manager/receptionist who was truly one-of-a-kind.

We had arrived in Levoca station after a creaky train journey from Bratislava, and all the coughing and nose-running I had tried to battle off over the previous two days had chosen this moment to metamorphose into a fully escalating fever. The two uphill miles from the station to the town centre seemed even longer in the rain that was just that little bit too malicious to be called drizzle. The hotel in question, right in the middle of the old town square, was listed in the ‘Top End’ category in the guidebook, and sounded unimaginably lavish by our standard at the time. It turned out to be our only choice by default after the discovery that the other, more budget-friendly option down the road, had closed for good.

Having sign-waved our way through numerous conversations in various small Czech and Slovakian towns by this point, we were startled when the only member of staff on duty opened his mouth with what could only be described as a mock-Basil Fawlty accent. ‘Ah, welcome to Levoca. I trust your stay shall be peaceful’ – meaning, as we discovered thirty seconds later, that we were the only guests in the hotel (and, by deduction, the only tourists mad enough to have come to this part of the world at this time of the year). Then, when being presented our passports – ‘Ah, I believe you are the first Chinese visitors we have ever had here.’ When being quizzed about weather in the following days – ‘I’m afraid the weather is expected to be unfavourable.’ Unfavourable! The last time I had heard anyone utter the word in real life was, well, actually no one ever spoke like that in Newcastle. W’ther’s go’a be shite, more likely. We ended up staying there for three full days and I have wanted to revisit Levoca ever since. To this day, not only was it the only hotel in all our hard-travelling years where a truly elegant suite (with art deco bathroom, complete with free-standing bath) cost fifteen dollars a night, but the memory of such ineffable charm, effortlessly exuded by one single person in the most unexpected place, always brings a smile to my face. These are the moments that make travel addicts out of us.

10 Unforgettable Travel Moments (so far) - Part II

#7: The Moment of Farce (aka The Journey from Hell)
Train journey from London to Manchester
January 2007

This was the Day of The Great Gale. True enough, all the other severe wind conditions before or since, as least as I've experienced in London, have been mere breezes in comparison. But nothing really justifies the way it turned out to be the Day of The Great Farce, as I’m about to tell you now.
This was also the first day of the annual conference of the Association of British Orchestras, this particular year being held in Manchester. Having been accustomed to the vast array of possible reasons obstructing normal operations of any form of British public transport, I wasn't entirely surprised when the 9:35am train I was supposed to embark on was cancelled before departure. It did mean that the passengers from two near-full services would be packed into one, the 10:05am train. I could take this, I thought. But little did I know that that was barely the beginning of what was going to be a very long day indeed.
Five minutes after the train pulled out of Euston station, the announcement came on that due to weather-related speed restriction, the journey would take five hours instead of two and a half. A sea of very un-English groans duly ensued, mostly – rightly – pointing out the absurdity of delaying this news until just after departure. About half the passengers in my carriage commented that they would have opted not to make the journey at all had they known. Well, it seemed that Virgin Trains knew exactly what they were doing – imagine them having to deal with all those refunds if that had been the case.
So we traveled on, at the greatly reduced speed of 55 miles per hour (supposedly – it felt slower). There were intermittent (unannounced, unexplained) stops along the way in between stations, so by the time we ground to a halt completely at Tamworth station, just outside Birmingham, it was well past one o’clock. After a thirty-minute pause, the announcer informed us that we were, well, to be held at the station indefinitely, because a tree had fallen on the tracks some twenty miles ahead and – I’m not making any of this up – ‘a team of engineers were on their way to the site with a view of removal of the said tree’. It was also advised that we got ourselves something to eat and drink at the station, especially as the shop on the train had sold out every last pack of crisps some time ago. I reacted quickly enough to be near the front of the queue at the single tiny shop at the station, where the flustered lady-in-charge was clearly bewildered by the sight of a meandering file of some two hundred customers suddenly materialising in the hope of getting their hands on the five sausage rolls she had for the day (my guess was that she usually had about seventeen customers a day on average). I succeeded, but the one hundred and ninety-seven people behind me had to make do with Maltesers and Mars bars – until they also ran out at customer No. 134, that was.
Back in the carriage, just as I foolishly started to feel smug about the warm sausage roll and the cup of tea I had gulped down, darkness fell – all the lights and, worse, the heating, suddenly went out. We must have, subconsciously, all been preparing ourselves for a very long doomed destiny with this journey, for by the time the next announcement came up ten minutes later it was greeted not by rage or even disbelief, but bemused roaring laughter. The new development was so utterly surreal, it could only be a true-life incident on a British train journey:
‘Ladies and gentleman, you will have noticed that we lost our power about ten minutes ago. I regret to inform you that not only were the engineers who arrived at the site unable to remove the fallen tree, the tree has apparently caught on fire, which has caused the entire West Coast main line to be out of power, and therefore this train – along with all other trains currently stopped between London and Manchester – will not be going anywhere today…’
Was there a happy ending to the story? Perhaps I should have sought a way back to London – geographically it would have made (just a little) more sense, but professional duty propelled me in the other direction, and I ended up in a rental car with two complete strangers, fellow young female professionals who were both returning home to Manchester after a work trip to London. My navigation skills faced the ultimate challenge – and proudly passed the test with flying colours – as we went through a whole maze of small country lanes across Worcestershire, Shropshire, Staffordshire and Cheshire (all the major roads were totally bottle-necked thanks to the weather and the railway fiasco) with nothing more than an old-fashioned road atlas courtesy of the rental company. SatNav? What was that? The three of us quickly bonded over an almost primal urge of taking things into our own hands, especially after all those hours we had spent on the farcical train journey that never ended. By the time I turned up at the conference it was just past 9pm, and the day has henceforth gone down in the memory lane – and to anyone willing to listen to my one hundredth retelling of the story – as ‘my epic eleven-and-a-half-hour journey from London to Manchester. Boy, was I determined to get there or not!’


#6: The Moment of True Community Spirit
Ultra-triathlon, Sado Island, Japan
September 2009

We found out that our weekend in Sado Island – our first-ever visit to this stunning part of the country where most Japanese have not visited – was going to coincide with the famous ultra-triathlon when booking our car ferry journeys. We did it just in time to get the tickets we wanted, but couldn’t help pondering whether one of our only three days on the island would be seriously disrupted by this big event on a small island. The new friends we made on the day before the race waved off our concern with a hearty smile: ‘Don’t worry at all! We’re very laid-back about these here – you’ll see.’ He also confirmed that the race would consist of 9km of swimming, followed by 140km of cycling (circling the entire island), and finally 45km of running. M beamed. I gulped.

The next morning, we took to the coastal road after breakfast, around nine o’clock. The second leg of the race was in full swing, and it was impossible not to be impressed by the gusto with which the cyclists were flying by us, considering they had done more swimming before I even woke up than I had ever done in my life. Our friend was right – there was no major-city marathon-style mania. Everything seemed, in distinctly Japanese manner of course, perfectly in order, with the clockwise side of the costal road reserved for the formidable triatheletes and the counter-clockwise side functioning as usual for us mere mortals shamefully moving about in our four-wheeled vehicles. There were the occasional policemen at major junctions, but mostly to bow their courteous bow and smile their courteous smile at similarly well-behaved motorists, rather than undertaking any ‘police duty’. So were there no cheerers with banners at all then, you ask – that fundamental element to all such events that keep the people going (especially as, let’s face it, the distances involved here are anything but human dimensions)? Well, the London/New York-sized crowds are nowhere to be seen, these toughened human beings perhaps do bristle at the idea of having their families traveling to this remote corner just to cheer them on, and for a short stretch of the road you do wonder if things are not a bit too much on the quiet side. But then you start to notice the locals sitting by the kerb, literally just outside their own front doors. Many were sprightly-looking septuagenians and beyond – Japan is known for its nation-wide longevity, and Sado Island is not a chosen destination of the young by any means. They pop themselves on little hand-made wooden stools, wearing a simple hat to shield the unforgiving sun, and cheer for each and every brave man and woman passing by in a rather quiet, understated manner. Catching these captivating sights at 50mph, I suddenly felt like being placed in an Ozu frame at slightly more modern pace, a beautifully seductive prospect. But then, at approximately five-hundred-meter intervals, there would be a bigger gathering of multi-generational families, usually led by an earnest female in her thirties, lifting – we slowed down especially to ascertain – large bowls of freshly-cut, mouth-watering (we knew because we had stuffed ourselves with them since arrival) local fruits. The pragmatism of taking pick of these seemed at once problematic, but they were a truly delightful sight compared with all the Lucozades that would be on offer instead along Tower Bridge or First Avenue. After all, for every cyclist intent on having a winning place in the race and was hard enough not to be allured by the juice watermelon chunks, there would be four who were grateful that they were there. They did not scrimp on their time so much and would stop for a few seconds and exchange a grateful smile with the ladies, take a much-needed mouthful of vitamin-filled liquid food and nod the emphatic thanks, before charging on. The race was meant to be an international gathering, proved by the dozen or so foreign faces we saw on the return ferry to the main land the next morning (although the universally expired look did not differ by nationality or any other criteria). Yet to me its exceptional charm lay in that easy, local feel. I certainly would never again be able to watch a marathon, live or otherwise, without thinking about those diminutive, smiling elderlies, or the ladies with their heart-warming fruit bowls.

Cuban Diaries - Preface

Our Cuban encounter really began in June of last year already, when we found ourselves at what was evidently the most popular event of the ‘Cuba 50’ celebrations at Barbican Centre, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the revolution. It was a memorable evening, as much for what was on stage as for the audience itself. I had, uncharacteristically, booked the event without much knowledge about any of the acts: an aged, Buena Vista Social Club-esque salsa band, an excellent young jazz trio, and finally, as the main act of the evening, a second half of nueva trova with Pablo Milanes and a small synthe-acoustic band. Judging from the ecstatic response from the Spanish-speaking crowd around us (an exceptional audience demography even for the Barbican, perhaps), we could tell he was a bit of a national icon, a Cuban Elton John of sorts. But then again, the spontaneous mass sing-alongs, which ended up accompanying almost every number he belted out, seemed to contain just a little more than mere passion for the music itself. After all, the guest of honour for the evening had been Madame Guevara, daughter of El Che himself, and the words ‘struggle’, ‘solidarity’, ‘freedom’ had been more than just recurring themes in her impassioned five-minute speech.

There was a certain sense of indefinable, quiet determination in the behaviour of the audience at large, even though the majority of them would presumably have been living in London for a while. They didn’t seem to want to make a big Patriotism manifesto out of the evening (whatever the intention of the event’s organisers had been), and yet the natural, effusive sense of pride, for the achievement of their artists, was acutely palpable and very, very infectious. At the time I was still ignorant of Milanes’s own eventful life story so far, which had included extended persecution by the government because of his homosexuality, ultimately redeemed by officially-endorsed icon status. That fact that he was now firing up the nostalgia of two thousand immigrants – a mixture of legitimate ones and exiles, I could only assume – seemed to carry more than a touch of irony.

The evening fascinated me in so many ways already, and I really, really couldn’t wait for our trip to begin, to see this ‘Land of the Miracles’ (as Steve Smith aptly entitled his beautifully-written book – a must for anyone who wants to know more about the country before visiting it) with our own eyes. If anything, for us it ought to be the Land of Fraternity, for China has supplanted Russia as the main economic benefactor of the nation, ever since the latter stopped its previously generous, crucial aid in the nineties, precipitating the long and bitter ‘special period’. We would again, I thought, stand out among the throngs of Western tourists, as always in the developing countries frequented by more adventurous travellers. But would we be hustled everywhere with non-stop ‘Ni-Hao-Konichiwas’, which inevitably taints one’s memories of even the most beautiful cities? Would we, even worse, be stared at everywhere by the vulture-eyes of expressionless locals who simply regarded us as strange novelties (growing up in China, I always thought this a privilege of the blue-eyed ‘foreigners’, until I inadvertently became one myself, in Burma, in the Middle East, in more remote corners of the US, even)? The only way to find out, of course, is to be there, to go everywhere, to experience – but first of all, to arrive.

10 Unforgettable Travel Moments (so far) - Part I

As you'll see, some of these are longer journeys rather than moments per se, but let's not get too academic here with the definition. All of the experiences made the list for a variety of wildly different reasons...

#10: The Moment of Disbelief
national highway, Eastern Syria (near Iraqi border)
April 2009
We've been exploring nearly half of the country by this point, both the more touristy route between Damascus and Palmyra, and the areas beyond, which distinctly less so. We've got used to the reckless locals suddenly appearing out of nowhere in the rear mirror, in their battered vehicles, overtaking us in a flash, and disappearing in the distance in similar Formula-One fashion. The Roman blood apparently still runs deep in many Syrian veins, a whole Millenium later, when it comes to driving. However, this relatively wound-less Kia (most new-ish cars gracing the roads in this country are Korean makers, including our rental car) has just done something very odd indeed: having overtaken us with no hesitation at all and already in a lead of about 500 meters, it suddenly slows down in the neighbouring lane - or something that's supposed to be such - as if waiting for us to reciprocate the triumphant gesture. We keep to our speed and catch up with it in a few seconds, and realise that we've become the object of this bizarre scrutiny-in-motion: the three local youths in the Kia have evidently never before seen two Asian tourists venturing into this part of the country in their own vehicle, and want to make sure that we're not some weird mirage that they dreamed up at high speed. Once they've ascertained that we really resemble normal human beings, albeit scoring even higher on the scale of recklessness perhaps, they step down on the gas once again and disappear into the horizon. You'll never believe how fast a ten-year-old Kia can possibly go until you've taken a trip along the Eupherates.

#9: The Moment of Natural Power
Prof Leider's house, near Miami, Florida
January 2006
Prof Leider was one of my PhD colleagues at Princeton, and the last time we saw each other was in early 2002. We're therefore doubly thrilled to be invited to this roast-pig party on New Year's Day at his new family abode, just under an hour's drive from Miami. The neighbourhood is your typical suburban Florida (or so as I perceive it): sprawling one-storey family homes, thus hurricane-proof, each with surrounding lawns and/or woodlands roughly the size of two or three postcodes in London. As we pull up the Leiders' driveway, the first sight that greets us is, um, a free-standing, seemingly fully-functioning, fully-loaded Pepsi machine. Our dear friend comes out the front door. 'Welcome you guys, so great to see you!' 'Yes wonderful to see you too but, listen, what on earth is this doing in your front lawn?!?!'
He grins and recounts the story for the five hundredth time. They had the annual hurricane season a couple of months ago, which in this part of the world is taken for granted as just a slightly more inconvenient part of your life. One of the more severe ones lasted about two days this time, and after it ended the Man of the House pulled up all the customary window boards and went out to inspect the damages. The first thing he sees, lying right outside their doorstep, is the Pepsi machine. He puts it up against the wall, finds a power socket and plug it in - for this is what you do when you see a Pepsi machine, right? - and lo and behold, the whole thing pops back into life instantly, complete with backlights. They now have a fully-loaded, fully-functioning Pepsi machine to entertain the two little children with. Of course, being the conscentious and intelligent people they are, they manage to track down the provenance of the machine, which in fact belonged to a school two towns away, pre-hurricane. Professor rings the school up informing them of this latest chapter in the adventure of the machine, but it would seem to be the final chapter, as the cheerful lady at the other end of the line asks him to keep it, for their brand-new replacement has already arrived courtesy of the super-efficient hurricant insurance company. This is the brief but bizzare tale of how two visitors from London end up spending part of their New Year's Day celebration inserting pairs of quarter coins into the Pepsi machine proudly guarding Prof Leider's front door, and receiving the can in the slot below with a loud Thud!, in amazement.

#8: The Moment of Pain
Midnight in Business Hotel Room, Stockholm
October 2006
I'm in my favourite city for a three-day business trip to attend multiple concerts featuring music by one of our most important composers as well as numerous meetings, and have happily settled down at the central hotel that I'm already familiar with from previous stays. Three in the morning, I suddenly wake up with the semi-conscious awareness that something is wrong. It takes another two seconds to realise that what's wrong is that I'm in excruciating pain, and yet another two and a half to locate the precise source of this pain - in my lower gums, where I had a filling done two years previously by a young dentist who I thought looked a bit haphazard at the time, and whom I now just want to strangle with what little strength there is left in me. The rest of the night is sheer agony - it doens't just hurt when you try to chew something on that side, but all the time, when you talk, when you think, when you try to think, every waking and sleeping minute. I stick to the original meeting schedule for the next two days while managing the minimum intake of food and drink that keeps me alive. I go to the dentist's (not the same one!) the moment I get back to London and a root canal is scheduled for the next day. Two lessons learned:
- Don't ever take anything for granted when it comes to the dental department. Nothing's ever wrong until something goes horribly wrong.
- The threshold of physical pain endurance is as high or as low as you can let it be.

Children of Syria

Like the best of adventures, it all started with a complete chance encounter.

[Day Two, Damascus]
It is our second afternoon in Damascus, and we have decided, on an all-too-full stomach from yet another scrumptious lunch, to launch into our favourite Damascene activity for the third time since arrival: letting yourself lost in the maze-like narrow streets in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, south of The Straight Street. While seeking out the Beits and Pashas with the aid of the trustworthy guidebook, we already realised that with the best maps available, it is still a major challange to navigate through the streets of the Old City even for those armed with a better-than-average sense of direction. Forgoing the book and not worrying about whether Sight No. 46 really is indeed in the surreptitious-looking lane on the third right, therefore, at once becomes an attractive alternative, especially after you've ticked off most of the 'must see' items on the list already. The myriad of narrow streets with unexpected turns and ends in various quarters, lined with deceptively crumbly-looking, centuries-old houses, reveal and conceal at the same time the palimpsests of histories that Damascus has witnessed as the Oldest City in the World. And, best of all, here in the warm afternoon sun in the Jewish quarter, there are no other tourists in sight.

We turn another corner and suddenly run into four school children. As I raise my camera tentatively the older two (siblings of the two younger ones respectively, we think) shirek with laughter and run away, but the little girl in the pink woolen dress (the April sun, while a sub-tropical relief for us, is evidently just signalling the end of winter for the locals) greets the shutter with the most captivating smile, and as I brave a second attempt, moves to the narrow stairway leading up to a house in the corner (her house?) and properly poses, like a happy little debutante at Royal Ballet School.

Her handsome companion, not to be outdone, effortlessly strikes the movie-star pose, with what we have already recognised as the typical Damascene look in so many of their elders' eyes: an innate combination of charm, friendliness and confidence. He's going be a heartbreaker one day, I say to myself.

[Day Three, Palmyra]

Once again, serendipity plays kind God to our itinerary. We originally planned to spend most of the afternoon visiting the ancient sites just outside of Palmyra town, thinking we would arrive by noon. Glitches with the car rental company in Damascus (almost compulsory in the Middle East, it seems) meant we didn't get to set off until almost noon, and by the time we arrive it's later afternoon. Would it not make more sense to take it easy for the rest of the day, and visit the sites tomorrow morning instead? This is of course what normal, sensible people would have done, but then we're far from sensible. We take the car out to the temple after the briefest snack that acted as lunch, and tour the entire site extensively yet efficiently, just before an ominous sandstorm approaches. Tomorrow morning, all the monuments would still be blurred in vision and we would have had to part Palmyra in regret. This is just perfect.

On the two-kilometre drive back to town centre, we're caught in a traffic jam. It's not stationary, just that everyone is moving considerably more slowly than we have come to expect Syrian drivers to be. We realise it's the combination of the bumpy road surface, and the number of families who have been out picnicing (it's Friday, the Islamic holiday) at various corners in the sites now heading home en mass. All of a sudden this truck overtakes us and stays in the queue, and this platoon of exctied children - mostly girls, but also a few boys - seem perfect in the camera viewer. The road remains bumpy though, and even my lovely new high-tech camera finds it difficult when both vehicles are in wave motion all the time. The children keep waving, smiling and shouting Hellos throughout my minute-long attempts, and finally, a split second before the truck swerves onto a side road and leaves our front view, I have it.

[Day Four, the road from Palmyra to Deir Er-Sur, near Iraqi border]

Petrol station attendants in Syria, even in this more remote corner of the country, turn out to be a lot more blase about foreign tourists who drive rental cars around the country than we expected them to be (our fellow travellers from the West, in comparison, usually think we're barking mad when they hear our planned itinerary). Here on the early morning of our fourth day, we have left a Palmyra that's still recovering from previous evening's sandstorm, and are heading off east. The first thing we need, though, is a thorough wash of the car before we can really get anywhere, as the sandstorm has graced all surfaces of the vehicle with its indelible mark. The bearded guy squatting on the ground smoking next to the pump - the manager?! - waves to the boys, looking about 10 years old, whom we have presumed was just a neighbour hanging about, signalling for him to take the job. He handles the big power-faucet dexterously enough to convince me that this is indeed his day job, and goes through the whole job with such ease and skill, that I start to think that he's doing it not out of financial necessity, but really because he's a lot better than any of the half-dozen older guys squatting idly. When he's done, I ask if I could take a photo of him with his 'territory'. He looks at the camera uncertainly, looks at the other guys and shrugs, then, looking in yet another direction, gives me the perfect smile.

[Day Four, later, near Halabiyya]

Syrians really are incredibly beautiful. It's a bountiful beauty with many origins, thanks to their diverse ancestral lineages. It's effectively the genetic melting pot of Middle-East - their version of New York, as M puts it. We've seen people in Damascus whose racial resemblance to ourselves was striking, and their best friends from down the street would have the angular central Asian face topped with a waterfall of blond hair. This young sheperdess has the deepest dark brown eyes as she turns to gaze at us, and I can swear the stunning redhead has nothing to do with any commerical colouring brand whatsoever.

[Day Five, Mari, down the Euphrates]

'The ruins of Mari, an important Mesopotamian city dating back some 500 years, are about 10km north of Abu Kamal (on the Syrian/Iraqi border).' Lonely Planet thus tells us. Unless you're a specialist archaeologist, it probably holds less interest than the nearby ruins of Doura Europos, which are at once more sprawling and imposing, with the perfect backdrop of the ancient river. We are glad we did come to Mari though, not least because the caretaker's family, a gaggle of female spanning several generations (no wonder the man had a deeply furrowed face, despite having young children), constitute a group-sitting portrait in their tent - effectively the living room - connect to the ticket office/souvenir shop that would surely have captured many a painter. Darting away from this silently inqiusitive group, almost as the perfect counterpoint, is the caretaker's youngest daughter, bouncing around the place and happily posing for/with a group of French tourists in her striking kaftan. After they're gone, she's ever so slightly withdrawn, and smiles shily for us. Is it simply because she's much more accustomed to the hordes of Caucasians who arrive in big buses than two badly-tanned Orientals who drive to this remote corner in their own car?

[Day Seven, Aleppo]

Of all our unusual encounters throughout years of travelling, this will go down the memory lane a long way. We're in Aleppo, the second largest city in Syria, home to the most enchanting souq in the entire Middle East (and therefore probably the world), some truly amazing cuisine, and hand-made aged olive oil soap. It is in the pursuit of a famed soap factory - which turns out to be closed - that we run into an army of schoolboys, all rushing home for their lunch hour. This lot, unlike all the others we've met so far, aren't just willing to have their photos taken by you. They want you to take photos of them, they actually follow you around and hound you until they've seen an image in the viewing screen on your camera that they relish. And as with all human groups, you immediately discern the various types, even with these little ones: the philosophical, the fraternal, the mischievous, the audacious.

And, in the midst of all this clamour, emerges the surreally beautiful trio of angels, perpetually smiling:


[Day Ten, Krak des Chevaliers]

This was the briefest of encounters - we've just come out of the awe-inspiring Krak after wandering around for a couple of hours, and are ready to head down towards Damascus to complete this memorable road trip. In the midst of the car park, there he is - while all his fellow hawkers are busy trying to allure some potential customers for a ride around the castle, this one is simply enjoying the two thousand features on his new phone to bother. I raise the camera, press the shutter, get into the car, and we drive away. I look back, and he's probably just started yet another text message...

(To see all the photos with better quality, run the slideshow here:

http://gotravel.smugmug.com/gallery/8008363_ecwD6#521128091_8v8J6)