The outskirts of the town of Deir ez-Zur on the Euphrates (geography classes about the fertile crescent way back in about 1952 in Sydney were coming to life at last!) were our first "tea stop" after leaving Palmyra. The omnipresent Assad family was with us there in all directions (of course!) and at the roadside was not only a Beduin hitchhiker but also some local council workers planting oleanders and olive trees in irrigated ditches in what (again) seemed like the middle of nowhere - Syria is always good for surprises.

Next stop was the ancient (5000 years) city of Mari (Tel Hariri), once the seat of a flourishing culture and one of the oldest cities in the world. The man to be remembered is Zimri Lim, the brother of the last Amorite king (about 1800 BC), who joined up with the king of Aleppo and with Hammurabi, the ruler of Babylon, to retrieve the city from the hands of a conqueror from the river Tigris and brought it to the zenith of its history as a trading centre. Finally, Hammurabi destroyed it and that was the end of Mari. In 1933 it was discovered by chance by French archaelogists. Today, it might not look very impressive (just sort of brown and muddy and not improved by the dust-storm we experienced while there) but excavation is continuing and the palace has been found to contain no fewer than 300 rooms!

Interestingly, 25 000 clay tablets with a cuneiform script have been discovered in the palace, including one on which a man requests the king to send him a doctor because he has earache! We had a picnic lunch in a Beduin tent - the owner appeared to have umpteen children, who would be assured of at least one good meal that day...our leftovers.

Dura Europos (as-Salihiya) - fortress of Europos, the Greek home of its founder - is not far from Mari in the fertile, green Euphrates valley with its numerous irrigation canals and "women in black". It's known as the "Pompei of the Syrian desert" and has a magnificent entrance gate and city walls. We had already seen the reconstructed synagogue from Dura Europos in the National Museum in Damascus and were curious to see what else had been excavated onsite and not removed to either Paris or Yale. Alexander the Great's successor, Seleukos Nikator, founded the city in the 3rd century BC and in the course of time it was conquered by the Parthians, the Roman emperor Trajan in 115 AD and finally the Persian Sassanids in 256 AD, who turned it into the heap of rubble (plus a considerable amount of sand and dust) that it is today. It is now hard to imagine Dura Europos as the cosmopolitan trading centre that it once was. For us, one of the most impressive moments on the tour was when we sighted the river Euphrates far below DE - for the first time in our lives! Our room in the Furat Cham Palace hotel in Deir ez-Zur overlooked the Euphrates - if the beer and wine hadn't been so expensive there, it would have been a dream!

Deir ez-Zur is reputed to be the hottest town in Syria but luckily, it was late October and definitely a good time of year to be there. The town was founded by the Ottoman Turks in 1860 at the crossroads of the Aleppo-Baghdad and Damascus-Mossul routes. It achieved notoriety in 1915, when a concentration camp for Christian Armenians was set up, a fact which is of course denied by the Turkish government today. We drove past roundabouts with huge coffee-pot-like sculptures in the middle and risked our lives walking along the French suspension bridge over the Euphrates, with its huge gaps between concrete slabs - probably never efficiently repaired in all the time between when the French erected it in the 1930s and now. We were surprised to see virtually no traffic on the river, apart from a couple of fishing boats. It's supposed to be pretty shallow and so most traffic goes by road.

Ar-Rusafa, or Sergiopolis, as it was called by the Byzantines, is north of Deir ez-Zur and thought to date back to the Assyrian period in the 9th C. BC. It's a pretty impressive ruined, walled (by Roman emperor Justinian I) city in the desert outside the present-day town of Rakka. After the christian Roman soldier Sergius refused to make an offering to the god of the times (around 305 AD), he was put to death and became a martyr, his friend Bacchus likewise. As a result, Ar-Rusafa later became a well-known place of pilgrimage, the relatively well preserved St. Sergius' church having been built in 559 AD. One remarkable sight at Ar-Rusafa is a huge cistern which used to hold enough water for 6000 people to live there in a dry period. Romans, Christians and Moslems resided there over the centuries and the city was used by the Ommayad caliphs as a summer residence or refuge from plagues. It was finally destroyed by the Mongols in the 13th C. and not rediscovered until the end of the 17th C. by English merchants from Aleppo (Halab).

Ar-Rusafa was another typical desert site with little more than the necessary facilities for travellers. A roof over our heads and a picnic lunch with numerous kinds of "mezze" provided by our driver and guide from "Syriana" were, however, all that was necessary to make the visit enjoyable. A herd of dromedaries on the road nearby added to the atmosphere.

The Assad dam was our final stop before Aleppo (Halab) - what a surprise it was! Not only were there gum trees (eucalyptus), which always makes an Aussie's heart stand still, but also, in the middle of this dry desert land, was water as far as the eye could see! The dam was built in 1963, giving Syria the control over its own electricity production. Unfortunately, Turkey has apparently also dammed the Euphrates and so caused new hassles for the Syrians.