Nightmare, nightmare, nightmare - guess why??Yep, the guide!!!She was late again so we went to the first stop with our driver and took a self guided tour of St Paul's Chapel, which is said to be the place where St Paul (Saul) evaded death at the hands of the Jews by being lowered in a basket over the city walls and making his escape from Damascus.When our guide finally arrived it was to inform us that we were being joined by another group of 6 people, one of whom...

We finally got ­­back to Damascus about 2045 but it took us another 30 minutes to make the 5-minute walk to our hotel!The old city is a maze of lanes and alleyways and the map we had was crap so combined with the fact that no one knew the Shahrayar, we were up against it.However, we soon had a crowd of locals, arguing amongst each other, in a friendly way, about the hotel's location, and we were quickly whisked off like the Pied Piper's followers for a night ...

We're off to Lebanon today and our guide is quickly starting to p*** us off.She's late for everything and totally disorganised - isn't the guide the one who's supposed to be constantly waiting for the tourists to catch up???Anyway, we crossed into Lebanon at the Al-Jdiedeh checkpoint and stopped at duty free, then waited for her to do her shopping, then go to the toilet.We kept losing her at the Lebanese entry as we needed Lebanese lira so she was trotting off tr...

Headed off for Syria today. We were supposed to visit Jaresh, a Greco-Roman ruin, but the tour operator obviously cocked up as our non-English speaking driver took us straight to Syria. The only border crossing between Jordan and Syria is at Ramtha/Der'a. Ramtha, on the Jordanian side, is about 88 kilometres north of Amman, and Der'a is 100 kilometers south of Damascus. Border control was an anticlimax really as I was expecting to be ushered into a small, dark...

Off to Damascus after Bosra and when we got to the oldest inhabited ciy in the world our driver dropped us off in the wrong place for our hotel then b*****ed off to leave me carrying 2/3rds my body weight in rucksacks up and down the narrow city lanes for 20+ minutes. We finally found our hotel which opened only 40 days ago which is why nobody had a clue that it existed let alone where it was. On the plus side the Sharayar hotel is a lovely place with a wond...