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Musings on Lattakia
The only reason I can think of anyone in their right mind wanting to go to lattakia is if you are desperate to feel the surge of giddy joy that fills your heart and accompanies you when you leave. Of course this is easy to say with the benefit of hindlegs, and when Emlyn proved too ill to come away for the weekend, and we did promise we wouldn't do Krak de Chevaliers without him, we decided a little foray on our own up to the beaches and another crusader castle would do us good.
After this slightly hastily taken yet made in good faith decision, we took the 4 and a half hour bus ride up to north western Syria. We almost went to Antakya which is in Turkey and I am certain that that would have been quite a unique experience, but as luck would have it we managed to avoid that unenviable fate only to stumble straight into another one.
We arrived early evening into Lattakia and found a taxi decorated with manchester united carpet on the dashboard and an eagle carpet stapled to the ceiling with a mini colour changing almost chandelier-like light in the centre. He dropped us off on the corniche which I innocently thought would be a good place to start from, have a quiet wander in the picturesque sunset and then find our hotel.
Now firstly let me say this to you - do NOT believe the lonely planet when it says that Lattakia is a pleasant place to spend a few days.
- Do NOT trust the map lonely planet had of Lattakia which confused India and I when we tried to use it - a couple of things were in the wrong place and the main roads were pretty much not mentioned, plus some of the road names seemed to be completely wrong. Oh and our hotel did not exist. At all.
-do NOT go to eat at the Italian corner restaurant where we had possibly the worst meal I have ever had (orange syrupy squash NOT the advertised fresh orange juice, a soggy bap with stringy cheese and frozen vegetables barely warm with tough and tasteless mystery meat which they called philadelphia burger steak sandwich, and for India a microwave pizza that had only just defrosted)
- Do NOT trust any taxi driver. Pretty much every single one we used seemed to have no idea about where he was actually going. More tales of idiot taxi drivers coming up later
The hotel lonely planet recommended not being in existence, we went to another they mentioned, to find a rather grotty place with sheets that didn't really fit the bed and fairly abrupt staff. We made our excuses, saying we were trying to find our friends and then checked out some other local hotels. They were worse. Imagine if you will a Victorian London slum with draconian plumbing reminiscent of a horror film and planks for beds with havisham like linen that looked like several people had taken turns dying in it before being wrapped in the aforementioned sheets and left in the rooms for a few weeks, perhaps to add a certain unique odour, perhaps to attract the cats that might help to deal with the cockroaches. After viewing a couple of these pensions, and concerned about the long term health affects of sleeping on sheets very possibly infected with syphilis, India and I had hysterics whilst viewing the next one. I think the man was a little shocked; perhaps he thought the noxious fumes seeping from the furnishing was adversely affecting our judgement. We were just amused at the particularly salubrious stains on the wall - even dead cats when flung against plaster wouldn't leave marks that that…
We were thus compelled to return to our original haunt which looked like a 5 star hotel in comparison to what we had just seen. We coughed up (not too consumptively) 500SYP for the night and were amazed to find a TV in our room and a fan that actually worked. And only small stains on the wall! Of course there had to be a hitch in this beautiful arrangement, and that was in one word - Hammam. The "western-style" toilet was brown with the excretions of someone very ill indeed who probably then did the noble deed and took himself off to snuff it in one of the other hotels I have already mentioned, and the Arab toilet was a tiny cubicle that possessed an odour of what I imagined the dead dog we saw on the roadside in Jordan would have smelt like if, once passed away and full of the gaseous miasma of morbidity, it had been transported, with a lot of rotten fish and all its flies and maggots, and left in that cubicle until the putrifying had taken effect and it was broken down enough to force down the hole.
Surprisingly though India and I remained amazingly calm and quite content throughout this ordeal and, despite having taken approximately 1 and a half hours to find ourselves in the right place from the bus station and having had the worst meal known to man and having trawled through the dank pits of despair that were the other "hotels" we still found the time to be continuously joyful. We even sat through two of the poorest films I think I have ever seen - one called 8 legged freaks which had a very young Scarlett Johanssen in it, and another called prey which possessed nothing of any merit whatsoever. It was great, especially when my shirt started biting me. Our resolve and strength of character would be tested should we want to stay too long in this place…
The next day, having risen fairly early, we found a fairly welcoming coffee joint to have pain au chocolate and drinks at. Needless to say we used the loos there as opposed to the dire ones of the hotel we just left. It reminded me of a 1950s ice cream parlour, but with more grown up armchairs and a model tall ship on the second floor. We then headed to the bus station (the taxi driver took us to the wrong one, but fortunately it turned out that the microbus we wanted also called here) and found the microbus to Hafeh, the nearest town to Qalat Salah-al-Din. We then negotiated, not very well, a taxi to take us to the castle itself, wait for us and take us back for 200SYP. We should have paid maybe a third of that, but the happiness of briefly leaving Lattakia behind clouded our judgement.
The castle itself made the entire trip worthwhile. It was a beautiful day, and the smell of pine and herbs and sunshine filled the air. The ruins are in amongst all the undergrowth that takes root when left for years, including brambles and it reminded us both of an enchanted castle, not unlike sleeping beauty. I tried to find some blackberries but with fairly limited success so we settled on eating bananas whilst we stared out across the countryside to the sea. We could have been anywhere on the Mediterranean, but it was best that we were in Syria. The journey to the castle and the view once you reached the top really made us appreciate how impressive this place must have looked and how daunting it would have been to even think of trying to storm it. In not very crusader fashion we scrambled over the extensive ruins, managing to avoid most of the tour groups eventually coming to this huge cavernous space filled with water and with small square gaps in the top with grating you could sit on as you looked into the deep. The water was quite far down, but the best thing about it was the acoustics if you called or sang into the hole. The echo and the sound made was so fun we spent about 15 minutes just doing that, me leaning over one hole and India over another. We then took the most precarious route down and then found another tower to go up and had more bananas there. This entire experience cost us about 15p (10SYP) plus bananas. I love being an Arabic student.
The taxi driver obviously felt a little bad about ripping us off quite so much, because he stopped to get us water from a special spring on the way back down. It was running from an old plastic drain pipe and neither of us were entirely sure how clean it actually was (there is a picture of us in front of it which epitomises the entire trip - not quite sure what to make of the whole thing) and then he took us to a point where you got a good view of the castle through the trees. He then insisted on taking us to drink coffee at his uncle's coffee place further up into the woods. We weren't so sure, but were a little helpless seeing as he was actually driving. We texted Everitte and begged him to call us in 15 minutes as we had already told the guy we were supposed to meet our friends back in Lattakia to go to the beach…The place we went to was magical - a children's playground and a music system set up in amongst the trees that it looked as if they had managed to work out how to create electricity from the pine sap. There even appeared to be a basin attached to one of the tree trunks. Anyways, we managed to make our excuses briefly when Everitte did the right thing and called us, just as the driver was saying that India had eyes like his ex-fiancee. He took us back into town and from there we headed to back to find a beach.
Oh dear. We should have just taken the hint and left while we still had a chance. We arrived at the bus station and thought it best to check when the buses out of Lattakia were. They appeared to be pretty much constant all day until late at night and no one said there would be a problem. Thus reassured that nothing would impede a hasty exit out of this place once happily refreshed on the beach we decided to hail some transport to take us there. We managed to find a taxi driver who, as it turned out, had pretty much no redeeming qualities to him at all. He drove us around, didn't take us where we asked him to, swerved around in the road, talked to us in the most incomprehensible accent and refused to shut up even when it was obvious we couldn't understand a word he was saying. Ignoring our gesticulations towards the hotels we passed and actually wanted to go to he took us to this completely local place with disgusting beach and nowhere to change where we were basically an exhibition for the locals and saying, "it's better here, it's free." We forced him then to take us after much arguing to one of the hotels that lonely planet recommended. He dropped us off outside and disappeared, obviously having taken great pleasure in messing around with two young western girls who were fairly powerless to do much.
We entered the hotel to find that we would have to pay 900SYP each for the use of their facilities - that is about £13 for a beach, showers and swimming pool for about two hours. This entire experience was descending from amusing farce into hellish nightmare - all we wanted to do was swim somewhere we wouldn't be stared at! Off down the path we trudged, only to see a horse trotting about the road, narrowly avoiding the cars. We were accosted by a man in his mid 50s in tight swimming trunks who said we could use the nearby local beach and then come into his house, use his shower and drink vodka with him. We politely declined, but headed down the path he pointed, hoping we could find somewhere quiet to swim.
The beach was the most horrendous thing I have ever seen. Piles of rubbish and detritus so thick you could barely see the sand. That is what the hotels pay to get removed from their bit of beach, but it was not comforting to see it in its natural state. We were so taken with the place we took our first ironic jumping shot in front of the vile Lattakia beach. After seeing this small stretch of coast and the colour of the cloudy water all inclinations towards swimming were somewhat curbed. To the bewilderment of the locals on the beach when we were prevented by walking further by a large concrete barrier we headed through what turned out to be private beach chalets, complete with security at the entrance and onto the road again where we flagged down a microbus and headed back into the hole of Lattakia once again.
We got off the microbus having no idea where we were. Fortunately, and one of the few things to work out that day, we walked in the right direction to end up somewhere we recognised. Then, via a shop to buy credit for India's birthday phone call to her mother (incidentally I was judged harshly by Hiba and her aunt for not calling my mother on her birthday, so I do apologise to you mother dearest and hope you did not take it too much to heart) we went to try our luck with an eating establishment once again.
Along the way we bumped into two shops I never expected to see - Mango and Promod. For the novelty, India and I went into both of them and tried on some clothes. It felt odd, but at the same time strangely comforting to know that Mango clothes fit me no better in the Middle East than they did at home. In promod I nearly bought a lovely wrap shawl-like turquoise thing until I realised I'd be spending the equivalent of about £30 on it, which may have been acceptable back home (it was such a lovely colour) but here it just seemed excessive. I would have spent in buying this thing about double what I had spent on the entire trip to Lattakia thusfar.
We slunk out of the shop a little reluctantly and found somewhere to eat only mildly less nasty than the Italian place the night before. In the same establishment, a while after we entered, came two English guys who looked equally unimpressed with Lattakia as we were. We toyed with the idea of going up to them and telling them to get out as soon as they possibly could, when they approached us instead. We chatted to them for quite a while - it turned out that that had just arrived from travelling through Turkey and were not liking Syria a great deal. We tried to explain that Lattakia was the worst place you could come to experience Syria and begged them to reserve their judgement until they travelled elsewhere. Talking to them and describing the rest of Syria to them made me realise just how awful Lattakia was - a seedy, run down Mediterranean sea-side resort built on an industrial port which would have been all right if you had stayed in your nice beach hotel and not seen the wasteland outside of it. We gave the guys our contact details in Damascus - if they get in touch and we meet up with them, hopefully by then they will have seen a little more of the real Syria.
Now some of the more learned of you will recall that Kafka referred to Prague, his home city as being like a cat who has claws. Lattakia proved no more difficult to escape than Prague was for our poor existential and frustrated writer and I did occasionally feel a little like Joseph K whilst trying to get out of the wretched place. We arrived at the bus station around 7.30pm to find that all the buses were full and that no one seemed particularly bothered in helping us at all. By this time, come hell or high water both of us had resolved not to spend any more time in Lattakia, even if this meant travelling to Homs and spending the night half way between Lattakia and Damascus. After fruitless forays up and down the numerous bus companies we were taken under the wing of a cheery Damascene Fatr and his sister who were also trying to get home. Without them we probably would have ended up sleeping on a bench at the bus station. Eventually, after a lot of sitting around and false alarms and crowding round dodgy men and listening closely to hearsay and trying to work out what was true and passing money around, we managed to get seats on a bus at 9.30pm. I think we were the lucky ones.We got out 29 hours after we arrived. That was enough for me.
After a fitful sleepish journey back I don't think I have ever been happier to see my little bab touma home. Surprisingly I wasn't depressed or upset, just annoyed at some bits of the trip, angry about the taxi drivers, blissfully content with my first crusader castle and slightly amused about the whole thing in general. I was strangely happy knowing that I arrived back to the closest thing to home I have on my birthday, allowing me to have a proper lie in and a free day (bunked off uni) to do a chilled half day tour to Malloula on the microbus, watch the Pink Panther and then go out and have a drink with Amer, Shakespeare, Ali, India, Everitte and Emlyn and later, after having the cheesiest happy birthday song played over the sound system going to another café, being joined by Hasan and chatting merrily far later than I should have knowing that I'd have to get up for uni the next morning. On top of that I got the best yak ever from Mirella which I had patiently waited to open until the appointed day, chocolate cake from Emlyn which we are consuming tonight at the poetry club AND a gold and green mosque clock from India. And I washed every single item of clothing I possess and have killed many mosquitoes in my room (creating my own sinister marks on the wall in homage to Lattakia) and have not been bitten by anything since. Little pleasures like this make me appreciate life all the more.
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