Along the way from Damascus to Palmyra, we stopped at a cross road....should we join the forces to battle the evils in Bagdad..a mere 150KM away, or forge forward to Palmyra? Our fate was decided at Bagdad Cafe 66 over chai.... the tour continues. Fayid got us all laughing playing eye spy with my little eye... can you guess what D stood for? That dam desert everywhere! Game over. We were fortunate to see a camel caravan taking the local Bedouin nomads to their winter location... at times these Caravans comprise up to a 1000 camels walking 20 KM at night to avoid day time temps up to 70C in summer. Palmrya is Syrias most popular sight. This ancient caravan city was built around an oasis in the 2nd century AD to faci1itate the spice and other trade through the region. It was a facinating site containing wonderful temples, collonade, tombs and a crusader castle that overlooked the city. On our visit of the tower and underground tombs we learnt that they were built as houses of eternity and housed up wards of 300 mummies. Life expectancy during that time was 50 yrs, that is why the statues that we see are all of younger people. Mourners would collect their tears in glass bottles and leave them at the tomb to give comfort to the dead. At night we went stoll%u0131ng to fi%u0131nd the c%u0131ty center instead we found packs of children wandering the streets late at night taunting us with chants of HELLO...WHERE YOU FROM...WHATS YOUR NAME????? %u0130t was so creepy but the icing on the cake was the camel head, neck and all, dangling outside the butcher shop. The ruins were amazing all lite up at night as you will see in the photos. Next, we wandered through the towering 12 century Krak Des Chevaliers crusaders castle. Very impressive as was the history we learnt. For 5hrs we looked out on this castle, taking it all in while playing cards as there was not anything else to do. The next morning, it was like Christmas with muslims celebrating the end of the fasting of Ramadan. People put on their Sunday best (new clothes for everyone), go to mosques to pray & then visit tombs of family members. Relatives are visited, kids are given candies & money & then a feast occurs as fami1ies go out for lunch to a restaurant. We celebrated it with candies, chocolates & pastries that morning.