Aleppo is interesting. Today, being a Friday is a holiday as it is effectively the equivalent of our Sunday so it is the holy day. We woke up to a myriad of calls to prayer this morning at 5.30am which I will try to record tomorrow. We are staying is the old city, (the place we are in was built in the 1400's) and we have at least three mosques within a few hundred yards, all with their competing minarets bristling with speakers to ensure the faithful receive t...

We stayed one night in Palmyra then drove a further 300 kilometers north East to Deir Ez-zor, where we were truly the only westerners in town and had the hotel to ourselves. Deir is not so far from where the US sent helicopters just a month or so ago, when they did their cross broader incursion into Syria, killing a number of civilians. I was surprised how far into Syria they had come and understandably we did pick up a sense of distrust from some of the locals...

From Damascus we hired a car for three nights and drove north east to Palmyra....driving in and getting out of Damascus was a bit of an experience, but nothing compared to arriving in Aleppo a few days later! Palmyra is a few hundred miles across the desert in the direction of the Iraqi border with lots of road signs pointing to Baghdad. It leads to two of the border crossing into Iraq, so as you might expect there is a quite a lot of military presence in this ...

We had several good days in Damascus staying in the old city (which is really OLD!) exploring the Souks and mosques etc. It really is a city of contrasts with different quarters across the city, including a large Christian and large Jewish quarter as well as . The New City area is vibrant and lively with modern shopping centres and attitudes as you would expect in a large city. The Souks in th old city remain as I experienced them in 2002, being vast and hassle...

Scotland was fantastic. It was wet, windy and sunny all in the same day on every day, much as you would expect, but we got some spectacular sunsets (well, two of them) and just loved being outdoors in it all the same. We took a 9-hour train from London to Inverness on the Saturday that was actually really nice. We went first class (special deal they had) which was lovely, so we had a man who came around proffering drinks and nibbles throughout, and very comfor...