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...

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 ...

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...