After driving for a couple of hours we reached the impressive ancient city of Apamea which is notable for its exceptionally long Roman street lined with classical columns. It was founded in 300 BC by SeleucusNicator, one of Alexander the Great's generals and the first king of the Seleucids in Syria. He named it after his Bactrian wife, Apame. The beautiful new Hellenistic city soon flourished, becoming one of the three main cities of the Seleucid Empire (with Ant...

An hour's drive this morning to the Saladin Castle then on to Apamea before stopping for 2 nights in Aleppo. We arrived at the castle to find that we had no guide organized and were content to go it alone until we saw the size of the place- impressive.We ummed and arred about paying for a guide ourselves and thought, what the hell.So a bit of haggling later off we set with what turned out to be a very knowledgeable and patient guide.What made t...

We had breakfast all to ourselves as it seems that everyone wanted to get to Krak Des Chevaliers early.As it was, when we arrived at 'Krak ' it was pretty quiet so maybe our reputation had preceded us so the groups all made a sharp exit before we got there.Anyway, we had a guide of sorts who gave us some of the history, inwhat sounded like Old English dialect (he left without a tip), and on the way out Maria asked a chap sat down by the entrance a couple of quest...

We stayed the night in the port town of Lattakia and took the opportunity to buy a Syrian SIM, which are really cheap here, to ease the problems with our mobiles.Easy!After wandering around town, having been guided by a student of English who walked us to practice his English, we arrived at the only retailer of local SIM cards for foreigners - Syriatel!Yes we can buy a SIM but in 3-4 days as they were out of stock - b*****!They kindly pointed us to another 'leg...

From Crac, we followed the itinerary to Tartous, a port city of significant historical importance, only to turn around again as soon as we arrived as the driver said there was nothing there other than some old houses!Ugarit came next.Ugarit is a Bronze Age city that flourished from about c. 1450 to 1200 BC, was inhabited by 6,000 BC or even earlier but then became completely deserted.The ruins lie in a large artificial mound called RasShamra and are north of La...