Palmyra to Damascus

Amman, Jordan

 

The intent of Friday morning was to catch a bus from Palmyra to Damascus that apparently left Palmyra at 11am, according to Mohammad. After stopping at the Spring Restaurant to have one last tea with that Mohammad, I got a short taxi to the bus station in Palmyra, arriving around 10:45am. As I got out of the taxi, someone sort of yelled at me "Damascus?". I nodded as he rushed over to me, directed me to the ticket counter where someone quickly filled out a ticket for me, then hurried me over to the waiting bus, where the driver opened the luggage bay, through my luggage in and then pointed me to my seat. No idea when the bus is supposed to leave, but as soon as I was seated, the door closed and we were off. It all happened so fast I had no chance to even realize that I must have been late or the last one to board. That's kind of the beauty of taking the bus, or the train for that matter. You can literally just show up seconds before the bus is supposed to leave, pay for a ticket and then just board it. No hassle, no security checks, no waiting in terminals. Just pay and go. One bonus was that I got a seat in the second last row, which for some strange spacing reason had more leg room then I needed... Sort of a first-class seat, all but in the back of the bus. No complaints here, for the first time in my travels my knees weren't jammed up against a seat back.

 

The ride to Damascus, which is south-west of Palmyra, goes back through the Syrian desert. There isn't all that much to see or talk about, accept we did pass one building at a highway junction that I so wish I could have taken a photo of. It was called the "Baghdad Cafe" and most likely the highway junction was for the road that lead to Iraq. (Apologies to those non San Francisco readers, but the Baghdad Cafe is an awesome cafe in San Francisco which is open 24 hours and just blocks from where I used to live.) For all I know, Baghdad Cafe's are a chain... I wonder...

 

Before I left Palmyra, Mohammad from the hotel had written in Arabic a note that I could show to the bus driver upon arriving in Damascus which told him where I wanted to go so that he could point me to the proper service taxi. You see, there are two types of taxis in the Middle East. Regular old yellow taxis that you take by yourself and pay a ton for, or service taxis which take a group of people from one destination to another. They operate on a flat fee and generally just leave as soon as the van fills up. From the Damascus bus station to downtown, I wanted to take a service taxi and wasn't about to pay for a full taxi.

 

Of course, the moment the bus unloads in Damascus, you're swamped with taxi drivers all too eager to "help" you get your luggage and take you to a waiting taxi. One driver took particular interest in me and just kept standing beside as the bags were unloaded, each time reaching for the bag as if it was mine, only to see someone else grab it. Finally my bag came off and he just assumed that I was going to travel with him. I politely told him that no, I was taking a service taxi. He gave me the usual "No service taxis from here to downtown.", then the "Service taxis have already left.", and several other lines. At one point I was getting kind of annoyed and felt like telling him that I could see the service taxis right behind in across the parking lot, but just as I was about tell him off, another taxi driver stepped in and speaking good English asked me where I wanted to go. I showed him the note in Arabic and he politely told me which service taxi I needed. This sort of annoyed the other driver and the two of them shared words that I couldn't understand. The guy who helped me kept saying that the other driver "was not honest", "He's not an honest man", especially since he was asking me first for 250 SP for the ride into town, and then down to 150 SP. I sort of felt that the honest guy should be rewarded and asked him how much it would cost if he drove me downtown. Surprisingly he smiled, looked at me and said "I'm not honest either, you should really just take the service taxi for 5 SP, it will get you right to where you need to go." Uh, ok... Thanks... Service taxi it was, for 5 Pounds.

 

Since the service taxi driver didn't really speak English, I just showed him my Arabic note and hoped that he'd point out the stop I needed to get off at. Sure enough, about 10 minutes after leaving the station, we pulled into a sort of local bus stop / service taxi hangout and he motioned that this was my stop. I wandered around a bit, trying to orient myself with a basic map that I had in my Lonely Planet but finally ended up just asking at some semi upscale hotel where I was on the map. (Street signs are hard to come by in Damascus, let alone English street signs, and especially English street signs that match the street names on the map I had.) The hotel clerk seemed to know where we were, but I wasn't convinced when he pointed at my map. I wandered around a bit longer until I passed an internet cafe that was on my map. All you need is one reference point and instantly I knew where I had to go. Turns out, the service taxi dropped me off within about 25 meters of the front door to the hotel, which was just down a side street that I had missed when I got out.... /sigh

 

Once checked into the hotel, I just spent the rest of the afternoon and night walking around Damascus. Unlike Aleppo, which I took a liking to almost immediately, Damascus didn't really have a feeling to it. It was just bigger and even more western then Aleppo. Tons of hotels, retail stores, juice stands, kebaps stands, etc... After awhile, that stuff sort of grows old and after wandering around for a few hours, I called it an early night and just headed back to the hostel for the night.