Walking To Jerusalem

The Final Furlong

The night before we reached Jerusalem, we stayed at the village of Neve Shalom ~ Wahat al Salam – another of the charities we had been raising money for. The village is a joint Arab and Jewish Israeli village, with equal numbers from each community. They run a bi-lingual school for all faiths (for children from the surrounding area too) as well as a peace school which brings people from across Israel together to explore the conflict. Although the community is a multi-faith community, however, the ethos is overwhelmingly secular – there is not a synagogue, mosque or church in the village. In deference to the vision of the founder of the village, a Christian monk called Fr Bruno Hissar, there is a “spiritual centre” – a place of great peace on the outskirts of the village. Reaching the village, we were welcomed by one of the PR officers, Howard, who had started out life in Dewsbury near Leeds before emigrating to Israel as a young man. It was a bit surprising in this far-away place to hear the vestiges of a Yorkshire accent. He kindly sorted us out with rooms in the hotel and got us passes for the swimming pool (bliss).

Tom rejoined the group in NSWaS with his father, ready for the final triumphal progression into Jerusalem. He’d had a bit of a sneak-preview over the previous few days. They’d also been out to the Sea of Galilee, narrowly avoiding more Hezbollah rockets as they were in a deserted Tiberias the day it got hit for the first time, witnessing first hand the dislocation and chaos caused in Northern Israel.

Our final day, the last 20 miles, we set off late. We hadn’t got very far when we bumped into Howard who had got up at the crack of dawn to show us the path, assumed that we had got up even earlier and followed after us to try and catch us up. He very kindly walked with us for two hours, showing us the route along the Burmah Road, an old British military road which was used by the fledgling IDF to supply the garrison in Jerusalem whilst it was besieged by Arab armies in 1948
. A beautiful, but scorching hot, day’s walk, climbing up into the hills of Judea towards Jerusalem. At lunchtime, having been invaded by a flock of goats
, we met a group of young Jewish American boys and their guides walking along the Israel trail. They invited us to join their Old Testament study group, but unfortunately we had to decline as we were running out of time. They very kindly showed us the springs along the way and pointed out a route for us on their map.

The final few miles into the city itself were along a busy three lane highway. Walking in single file along the hard shoulder as the traffic shot past, tired after walking 20 miles through the heat, grimy with dirt and sweat and aching in our joints from impact on the concrete road, we came close to sense of humour failure and tempting thoughts of jumping on a bus. A few rousing choruses of “To Be a Pilgrim” (largely drowned out by the noise of the traffic) seemed to do the trick, however, and we ploughed on into the outskirts of the city.

We reached the Jaffa gate just as the sun was setting and (after the obligatory photos)
plunged down along the medieval cobbled streets into the heart of the old city. The beautiful limestone glowed in the evening light and as we walked the muezzin’s call echoed out from the Haram al Sharif over the rooftops as it has done for hundred’s of years. Traders were shutting up their shops and hurrying home for prayers and dinner, whilst a few tourist stragglers wandered along. The whole city breathed out a remarkable sense of peace. We arrived at the Holy Sepulchre, the holiest site in Christendom (traditionally the site of Christ’s crucifixion, burial and resurrection) just as the last light was ebbing from the sky. Inside, the gloom was lit in pockets by a few early candles and the odd flickering oil lamp. It was virtually deserted. We walked over to the sepulchre itself (the tomb of Christ) and sat down in silence and contemplation. For what seemed like and age, we just sat there, staring at it, each absorbed in their own thoughts, a row of pilgrims smiling and gazing in awe and reverence, just as thousands have done in the past. Take away the modern outdoor clothing and it could have been a scene from any time over the past 1,500 years.

But we couldn’t stay there all evening – there were party plans afoot! Tom’s Dad came and picked us up from the Damascus gate and drove us (bliss!) up the hill to our lodgings, the Maison D’Abraham, where we bumped into Fr Henry Wansbrough, James’s former housemaster, and his party of pilgrims from North London Collegiate School, ably chaperoned by Blanche Girouard. We made our apologies for the smell and disappeared off for much needed showers before returning to share Israeli Champagne and head out for a fantastic celebratory meal. The emotion and excitement proved too much for poor James who fell asleep
curled up in a ball on a pile of cushions whilst the others (Tom’s Dad included
) smoked hookah pipes and drank vast quantities of wine. It all felt very “Arabian Nights”.

Tom sadly had to leave us the next day – a return to “normal life” with a bump. A hectic weekend saw him move house from Glasgow to Swindon then start work in a new job the Monday after – just 5 days after we reached Jerusalem. The rest of us got to spend a few extra days in Jerusalem, drinking in the incredible atmosphere of the city, visiting the great holy sites of the three mono-theistic religions. We saw the wailing wall
, a curious mix of powerful grief, with ancient elders wailing their laments and stuffing their petitions into the cracks between the stones, and at the same time great joy as wild women ululated and families celebrated bar mitzvahs, mixed in amongst them rabbis lead their flocks up and down singing joyful hymns and chanting scriptures. In contrast to the wild and chaotic scenes of the Wailing Wall, the Haram al Sharif, the noble mount, site of the great temple of the Lord and now home to the Al Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock
, was a haven of peace and ordered tranquillity. Scarcely a sound disturbed its piece save a breath of wind sighing in the leaves of the serried ranks of trees, or a pair of doves cooing gently in their branches, or the gentle soothing plash of water in the great ablution fountains. Sadly, since Ariel Sharon’s incendiary trip onto the temple mount in 2000 which sparked the second intifada, non-Muslims have been banned from entering the mosques in the complex, so we could only admire from outside the graceful symmetry of the Al Aqsa mosque and the beautiful tile work and exquisite mosaics covering the outside of the Dome of the Rock (said to cover the stone altar on which Abraham was to sacrifice Isaac and from which Mohammad ascended into heaven in his midnight journey).

Within the walls of the old city, there were plenty of reminders of the terrible conflict going on in the North. The usual summer flood of tourists had slowed to a trickle as countless groups cancelled their trips and in the doorways of barbers and cafés, Arab men gathered to watch the terrible scenes of destruction being played out on Al-Jazeera, to exchange views and to sympathise with those in Lebanon and Northern Israel. On our final morning, a Friday, James and James went for one last trip around the old city. It was thronged with police in riot gear and IDF soldiers carrying guns. Every gate had a cordon of metal barriers thrown round it and long queues of people trying to get into the city and you could almost touch the tension in the air. If the Sabbath had caught us unprepared, Friday prayers in the middle of a conflict situation completely knocked us for six. We just had time to pick up last souvenirs and for James to go to confession (the crowning moment of the medieval pilgrims’ visit, shriving the pilgrim of all sins and guaranteeing them a place in heaven) and we had to rush out to catch our buses. As we left the old city, we walked past a street filled with riot police and soldiers, backed up with a huge riot van complete with water cannon. Facing them in an uneasy stand-off was a large crowd of young bearded men intent on attending Friday prayers on the Haram al Sharif. Glancing over nervously, we decided we had outstayed our welcome and it was time to go home.

And so our long and arduous pilgrimage drew to a close. 3,650 miles, 247 days, 10 countries, 4 pairs of hiking boots, 3 plenary indulgences and two tired pilgrims. One amazing adventure. Many have pointed out the irony that our walk for peace ended as the worst crisis in 20 years engulfed the Middle East, resulting in over 1,000 innocent civilian deaths on both sides of the border, the destruction of a country’s infrastructure (tragically, of a country still struggling out of the legacy of a disastrous civil war that had just about been getting itself back on its feet) and the death of hopes for an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank. Rather than be swallowed by despair, however, it just highlights to us that now more than ever peace and reconciliation work is desperately needed in this region. On the way in to Jerusalem we were able to visit three projects run by our chosen charities and saw that despite the desperate situation, Jews, Muslims, Christians and people from all faiths, can live in peace. What’s more, the kindness and welcome we received wherever we went, regardless of race, creed or colour, the gentleness and kindness of our hosts, restored our faith in humankind and made us certain that eventually peace will come.

We couldn’t leave without one last big thank you, to our parents, families and friends for their support and love, to Zeina and Kate for their understanding and support of our wanderlust, to Mickle, Trin, Emma and Clare for making the final furlong so special, to Father Matthew and the Abbot and community of Vaitopedi, to Tover, CVO, Ellie, Victoria Short, Canon Ian Sherwood, Cenk, Firat, Caan, Mehmet, Ahmed, Nadia, Isa and their mother, Nidal, Georges, Lucy and Joumana, Tarek, Helen, Ibrahim and family, Elias and family and Howard, who came to see us or gave us sustenance on the way, to Katherine, Emma, Hugh, Tamsin, Tommy, Jane, Wilma, Andrea, the De Charettes, Ghisalain and family, the Venturas, Harvey, Jon, Andy, Ian, Katherine, Tom, Debs, Meredith and Yannis who walked or hosted last year, to Simon, Angela, Benita, Gillian, Wissam, Jill, Jun, Itay, Josh and Louise for their support and encouragement and to all who donated to St Ethelburgas, NSWaS, Mar Elias and Encompass. Biggest thanks of all go out to the countless nameless individuals, too numerous to mention who gave us tea, food, a smile or a wave and helped us along the way just because we were strangers in a strange land and who reminded us again of the essential goodness of mankind.

War and Peace

From Yousef’s house, Trin, Emma and Tom headed off towards Jerash and the Allenby Bridge border crossing to avoid getting Jordanian exit/Israeli entry stamps in their passports. Trin and Emma were flying back from Damascus and didn’t want to be refused entry because they had the wrong kind of stamps in their passport. That left me walking on my own for the first time this year. As I walked up into the ridges above the Jordan valley, I felt quite lonely – I had got so used to having Tom there that even if we didn’t actually say much to each other (beyond the odd grunt), his presence was somehow comforting. It was short-lived solitude, however; two hours later as I walked along trying to shake off a trio of exceptionally annoying kids, a people carrier drew up and disgorged Clare Adam and James Micklethwait – two friends from University who had come to join for the glory stretch towards Jerusalem. The three kids had a field day, begging money, getting tangled up between our legs, throwing unripe green olives at us, pinching Clare’s bottom, and generally making a nuisance of themselves
. Eventually, I had to drop my pack and chase them away, to much laughter. We camped for the night on a spur of mountain looking down into the Jordan valley. Looking around our campsite
, we strayed across some trenches dug into the rock – took me a while to realise that these were not archaeological trenches, but military trenches, looking out across the Jordan towards Israel. Another reminder of a not-so-peaceful past.

The next morning, we dropped some 800 metres down into the Jordan valley – at 265 metres below sea-level, literally the lowest point on the pilgrimage
. Walking down the fertile valleys, we ate fresh pomegranates straight from the tree and delicious grapes provided by a kindly family who motioned us into the shade below their vines and fed us royally. In the valley bottom, the heat was stifling – no breeze, a roasting hot midday sun and a thick, heavy atmosphere. We left Jordan with relatively little problem (barring a brief argument with the border guards over whether we could walk or not – they told us we’d be shot if we didn’t go in the bus. We decided to do as we were told), and Clare and James had a smooth run through the Israeli border. I was a slightly different matter…
A rather aggressive woman looked at my passport and demanded “What were you doing in Syria and Lebanon?”
“I was walking”
“What do you mean?”
“I was walking – I walked here from London”
“Really? That’s amazing!”
Hostility evaporated in a moment whilst she told everyone else in the office. Unfortunately, however, the official within her took over again, although she was very apologetic about it.
“I’m really sorry sir, I’m afraid we’ll have to run a security check on you – we’ll be as quick as possible”

Visions of large men ushering me into a soundproof room whilst they pulled on rubber gloves with a meaningful expression rose worryingly in my head. Luckily, all she meant was a computer check. We were there for an hour in total, but it was relatively painless. More than can be said for the poor Arab-Israeli man trying to get his child in to Israel. An Israeli citizen, he was married to a Jordanian woman and lived in Jordan. As the baby was born in Jordan to a Jordanian mother, the Israeli authorities refused the child an Israeli passport. Unfortunately, in Jordan children take their nationality from their father, so the child had been unable to get a Jordanian passport either – she was effectively stateless (like so many Palestinians in refugee camps in Syria and Lebanon). Eventually, after much rigmarole, he was allowed to bring the baby in with him, but it took even longer than my security check.

Sleeping out the heat of the day, we continued towards Nazareth in the late afternoon, where we met up again with Trin and Emma. They had gone down to Jerash and spent a wonderful morning going around the ruins, only to discover that the Allenby Bridge crossing closed at midday. Too late to get there in time, they poured out their hearts to the tourist police who took pity on them and phoned ahead to the Northern border crossing and ensured they got through with no stamps in their passports. Tom had headed on straight down to Jerusalem to meet his father and they had come on to Nazareth to find us accommodation in a beautiful old Merchant’s house in the heart of the old city.

The next day we had a day off. In the morning, we wandered round Nazareth. The main sites are the Church of the Annunciation with its huge dome and the remains of its Byzantine predecessor entombed inside, where the Angel Gabriel is said to have appeared to Mary, and Mary’s Well (or Mary’s loo as it was rechristened after we saw a young man relieving himself against it in broad daylight), where Mary is said to have gathered water (although the grounds for believing that seem somewhat flimsy).
In the afternoon, we headed off into the heart of the Galilee countryside to visit the Mar Elias Educational Institutions, one of the charities that we have been raising money for. We were met there by the deputy headmaster of the secondary school (there is a kindergarten, a primary school, a secondary school and the beginnings of a University), himself called Elias, who looked after us for the day. His first act was to take us into a room, sit us down with a glass of squash and then say “How much do you know about the situation here?”

He then went on to paint a picture of life for the average Arab-Israeli. Often forgotten about, Arab-Israelis are Israeli citizens of Arab descent who stayed behind after the foundation of the state of Israel. Some 20% of the population of Israel is not Jewish, but Moslem or Christian Arab. Whilst to some extend better off than their cousins (and sometimes brothers and sisters) in the West Bank and Gaza strip (who don’t have Israeli citizenship), they are still widely discriminated against in what amounts in all but name to an apartheid system. Much of the discrimination is justified on the grounds that they refuse National Service (compulsory for three years for Jewish Israelis), but there are strong reasons for their reluctance (not least that in peacetime the main task of the IDF is being deployed against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza). For every $1 of public money spent in Arab areas, $5 is spent in Jewish areas; Jewish areas have better roads, better public services, better schools... Arabs are far more likely to be stopped by police patrols, they are routinely strip searched entering or leaving the country, they have to wait three years between school and university (to keep them at the same level as their Jewish neighbours), which many cannot afford to do… The list goes on. The Christian Arabs feel particularly vulnerable – there are less of them and their numbers are dwindling fast, partly as a result of lower birth-rates, but also because as they are traditionally better educated, they emigrate far more than the Muslim Arab population. They also feel under pressure from both sides. Recently when the founder of Mar Elias, Abouna Elias Chacour, said that he wanted to live at peace with his Jewish brothers, the school was boycotted by many in the Muslim community.

Yet despite the discrimination, the ethos of the school, driven by Abouna Chacour, is one of reconciliation and peace – not peace at all costs, but peace with dignity and equity. The school is open to all faiths and although there are no Jewish children there (it is far from the Jewish areas), there are Druze, Muslim and Christian pupils and Jewish teachers on the faculty. Moreover, frequent inter-faith encounters encouraged by the school at all levers. And it seems to be working – the school consistently comes in the top percentile in the Israeli education system. The most remarkable thing is to see that this thriving, vibrant place which gives hope to the inhabitants would have been impossible without the energy, the drive and the vision of the founder Elias Chacour. One famous example of his determination occurred when he was being denied a building permit for the school by the Israeli government (for which he spent a spell in prison). Travelling all the way to Washington, he rang on the doorbell of the former Secretary of State James Baker unannounced and uninvited and persuaded him to help. The building permit came through days later. For anyone who hasn’t read the remarkable story, I cannot recommend highly enough Abouna Chacour’s two books – “We belong to the land” and “Blood Brothers”.

Elias gave us a tour of the buildings then took us back to his house to meet his family – his wife (another teacher in the school) and his two daughters, one of whom was celebrating her birthday
. We were treated to a wonderful feast of fruit and birthday ice-cream. The joy of the encounter was tempered by the scenes on the TV behind us – that morning the Israeli air force had begun its devastating campaign against Lebanon and the scenes of death and destruction were already coming over on Al-Jazeera. Bloodied women and children being pulled from the wrecks of buildings, the ground shaking at new impacts, planes roaring past as black smoke billowed out. You could see the anger on Elias’ face. An anger I felt as I thought of all the kind and wonderful people Tom and I had met in Lebanon and thought of their suffering at this latest crisis.

The next day we headed out of Nazareth
, down the hills along a beautiful track through a pine forest, the warm air filled with the spicy-sweet scent of pine resin. We lunched in a peaceful orange grove and rested under the thick leaves through the heat of the day. Received several phone calls from worried parents and girlfriend asking where we were and if we were ok. I replied in a very blasé way that yes we were fine, that we were miles from any danger and that things were great. Five minutes beyond our lunch spot, we walked past an Israeli air force base where F16 fighter-bombers screamed off into the sky. That night, we heard that Nazareth had been hit for the first time by Hezbollah rockets. A new level of fear and uncertainty for the people of Northern Israel, Jew and Arab alike. We were especially worried for Clare who left us to head back to Nazareth for the night before leaving for Jordan the following day.

Somewhat taken by surprise by the Sabbath – we forgot that everything shut well before nightfall on Friday and were caught in the middle of nowhere with no provisions for the night. Luckily (and not for the last time), a nearby petrol station came to the rescue and we feasted on pre-packed sandwiches, pots of dips and cans of beer. Back to consumer, throw-away society and loving it. To celebrate the end of the Sabbath the following evening, we ate in a kosher Burger King. Pretty much the same, only no cheese burgers. Afterwards, desperate for somewhere to pitch our tents, we ended up sleeping in a war memorial – possibly the strangest place I’ve slept so far (and that includes a motorway lay-by, a school playground, a half-finished house and in a beach bar). The Israeli soldiers guarding it were very obliging, allowing us to bed down on the lovely soft grass, pointing us out the wash rooms and mounting an all night guard over us. We certainly felt very safe.

Out route from here followed an old Roman / pilgrim road running North-South in a dead straight line between the coast and the borders of the West Bank.
The surroundings alternated between the orderly green fields of kibbutzes and private farms and chaotic Arab towns and villages. One minute, we were walking along a golf course flat, perfectly preened lawn or between rows of regimented avocado or peach trees, the next we were surrounded by banks of rubbish and haphazardly built housing whilst trying to avoid a particularly grumpy looking camel tethered to an electricity pylon. Along its course, we had our preconceptions challenged again and again. The Arabs we met were universally friendly and welcoming, laughing and joking with us, or posing for photographs. When we came to Jewish areas, however, people seemed immediately suspicious of these dirty strangers wandering along. Just as we were beginning to think, however, that all the stories we had heard about Israeli’s being aggressive and rude were true, something would happen to completely change this view and to leave us feeling stupid and guilt-ridden for our prejudice and our attempts to put people in boxes. One evening, we asked a young Jewish man called Nathan if we could camp somewhere nearby. He was friendliness itself and took us off to a quiet field hidden from view behind a barn – “this is my field – you can stay here if you like. Use the sprinkler system for a shower if you need. I’ll be back later on to see how you’re getting on”. He disappeared home for dinner, leaving us to put up tents and wash under the sprinklers -very refreshing, except I pulled the hose out from the sprinkler accidentally, which then writhed about in a mad dance, spraying me from head to foot and soaking my trousers before I finally brought it under control. As we were going about our business, a young Jewish man drove over on his tractor and started shouting at us in Hebrew. We shrugged our shoulders with a “sorry, we don’t understand”, but he just shouted louder. Then he started picking up our things and throwing them around. At this point, having radio-ed for back-up, two truck loads more of people appeared, also shouting and gesticulating in Hebrew. We were more than a little alarmed, particularly as our young friend from the tractor started to square up to James M and looked as if he was about to punch him. Luckily, he was pulled back by his friends who then produced a mobile phone turned on speakerphone with someone who understood English on the line. A very bizarre conversation as she evidently tried to control two hyperactive little boys in the background, do her cooking and talk to us all at the same time. Eventually, she managed to communicate to us that the posse of angry looking young men standing in front of us looking like they intended to do us serious harm were in fact trying to help and wanted to know if we were all right or if we needed anything. All misunderstandings sorted out, handshakes all round and they left us in peace for the night.

Or so we thought. Half an hour later, a pick-up bounced back down the farm track. We groaned – what now? One of the young men from earlier got out and handed us an ice-cold bottle of water and a fat, juicy watermelon. An hour later, he was back again, this time with a huge flask of freshly brewed coffee and a big box of home baked biscuits. Half an hour after that, Nathan returned with a pot full of delicious chilli barbecued chicken and a bottle of wine very disappointed that at 11:30 we were trying to go to sleep. Such incredible hospitality, which we had been led to expect we wouldn’t receive, particularly on the back of the previous apparent aggression, totally disarmed us and left us slightly confused.

Hauran-tastic

Heading out of Damascus and back up into the hills, the heat lessened and we got our lovely afternoon breeze back. The Hauran is a really strange area – pockets of really fertile soil are interspersed with expanses of barren volcanic rock, with a few goats picking their way between boulders and rocks.
The area was one of the breadbaskets of the Roman Empire, its rich volcanic soil and plentiful spring rains producing big harvests. Stumbling into one of the fertile areas having just crossed a baking hot ancient lava field, we were welcomed by a farmer who led us into the shade of a tree and shared a delicious, cold and incredibly refreshing water melon with us.

The route James had planned went down what looked like a nice quiet side road away from the main road to Jordan. Had he looked a little closer at the map, he might have noticed that it was also the nearest North-South road to the Golan Heights. We hadn’t got very far when we ran into a military checkpoint manned not by the usual scruffy, bored-looking youths, but by one bored looking youth and a rather more serious looking NCO. After looking at our passports and going through the usual motions of pretending to do their job, they waved us on our way. Or so we thought. We managed to get a whole 100 metres further along before the scruffy youth ran after us and demanded we come back to the checkpoint. We were marched from there off to the main barracks where we had coffee with the big boss and a conscript who spoke English was dug out from somewhere. Apparently, we had blundered into a military zone and the road for the next 5 miles was shut to foreigners. After asking us a few questions and looking at our strange get up (sticks, hats, big smelly rucksacks), they clearly decided we didn’t represent a clear and present danger (except to their nostrils) and waved us on our way.
Several miles further on, attempting a clever cross country route, we blundered into another military camp. We tried to march straight on through, but were warned by the guys we met on the gate that we were liable to be shot if we strayed over the boundary fence. They very kindly showed us back to the road and left us alone. At this point, we decided that possibly our road wasn’t the most sensible – to blunder into one military zone might be considered a mistake, to blunder into two begins to look a little suspicious, to blunder into three… we didn't really want to contemplate. Perhaps watching Syriana before we left wasn’t the best idea.

Besides the massive military presence alongside the Golan, there were other reminders of the continued friction in the region – we bumped into an old man, Abu Qasim, who had lived in the Golan, but had been forced to flee when the Israelis captured it during the 1967 war. Further along, we came to a village occupied by Palestinian refugees. Various UNWRA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency – the body which deals with relief for the Palestinians) buildings – a clinic, a school, offices – were spread through the village.

More incredible hospitality along the way. In the village of As Sanamayn, we were given tea by a group of old men. They then launched into a heated diatribe against George Bush and Tony Blair accompanied with lots of actions – one old man took off his shoe and started to beat imaginary Blairs and Bushes about the head. We could only agree with their critique of Western policy in the Arab world (at least the very little we understood – “Why Iraq? Why Iraq?”), but possibly not with the more extreme punishments they wanted subjected the President and Prime Minister to. Whilst our old man was still in full flow, we were invited to the house of the local shopkeeper for breakfast and were treated to a delicious spread of olives, cucumbers, tomatoes, humus etc. and met his father and grandson, both called Reda. Reda younger was about to go off to medical school in Damascus and was hoping to come to England as part of his studies.

About 20km North of the border, in the small village of Ibta (not even marked on our -admittedly limited- map), we were taken in by Ibrahim and Helen Hariri (the sister of one of James’ school friends, Tom Flynn) and their extended family. Ibrahim and his brothers live in houses dotted around a compound centred on his father’s house and share with each other child care, meals etc. Tom had promised us “Homeric hospitality, but without the tripods”, but even fore-warned we were not quite prepared for the incredibly warm reception that we got. First we were treated to a huge meal of delicious fresh bread with thyme (zatar), tomatoes, eggs, olives, cucumber, cheese and lots of other delicious things. We ate until we couldn’t eat any more, assuming that this was the main meal of the day, then collapsed onto huge piles of cushions for a restorative nap, only to be woken some hours later for an even bigger feast – kofte, lamb, chicken, humus, aubergine dip, bread, salad, olives and mounds of delicious fragrant rice. Sat and chatted with
Helen, Ibrahim and his brothers, played with the kids (some of the 14 in the extended family living in the compound) and were generally made to feel at the same time part of the family and honoured guests. We took our leave sadly and staggered off down the road towards the border, feeling several pounds heavier.

In Deraa, we met up again with Trin and Emma who had been enjoying the sights and sounds of Damascus
. Deraa was once an important post on the Hejaz railway and the remains of it still straggle through the town, kept more or less alive by the one train a week heading down to Amman from Damascus. We had an unexpected day off when James caught food poisoning from an ill-advised street kebab. Finding himself at 6am slumped on the floor of our hotel bathroom, sprawled over the hole in the ground toilet, feverish, sweating and periodically heaving his guts into the hole in the ground, surrounded by the vile smell and aching in every limb is possibly the lowest point reached in the entire 9 months of pilgrimage. He had an inkling of how Lawrence of Arabia must have felt when he was imprisoned, beaten and allegedly sodomised in Deraa by a Turkish officer during the Arab revolt.

Luckily it was a short lived bout and James was more or less recovered a day later. We did get to sample the local fancy hotel’s cuisine which promised “a symphony of tastes to multiply the palates”. The sorry collection of limp lettuce, tinned olives and Russian salad that had developed a crust it had been sitting around so long that made up their salad bar didn’t do much to multiply anyone’s palate and there wasn’t much symphonic about the main courses either.

Not sorry to turn our backs on Deraa and head into Jordan. We tried to walk across the border, breezing past several soldiers/secret police etc., but were eventually pulled up short at the final barrier by a man carrying an AK-47. We still had an argument about it, but he told us we’d be shot if we tried to walk. We weren’t sure if he would be doing the shooting or someone else, but we decided not to argue the point any more. Instead, we were motioned into the back of some monster American car, left over from the oil boom of the 70’s, and roared out of Syria and into Jordan. Stopping at the first inspection post, a Jordanian border guard came over to inspect our passports and make sure everything was in order. Looking into the back of the car, he saw Emma and exclaimed “Look at those beautiful blue eyes!”, calling over to all his colleagues to come and have a look. Still, it seemed to speed our way through the border formalities quite nicely (as much as one can speed in Jordan – given we had to wait for the man running the exchange facility – late for work – and the man selling visas – asleep in the back office – “Just bang loudly” was the advice we got from the border guards) and we were soon on the road to Irbid.

Perhaps we shouldn’t have chosen the cheapest hotel in Irbid to stay in. A moment’s reflection might have given us second thoughts. Still, at £3/night, we didn’t think we could afford to be fussy. How wrong we were. In the girls’ room, a full ashtray sat on the floor and two unfinished cups of tea. The bedclothes didn’t look like they’d been changed in a while. Upstairs, the boys’ room was a darker, dingier replica of the girls’ with similar over-flowing ashtray and unchanged sheets. And then we saw the bathroom… An evil smell hit us full on as the door swung open, revealing a black hole in the ground (no cistern) and a cold water pipe projecting from the roof for a shower. We practically bumped into the girls as we all headed for the door in a mad rush to get out as quickly as possible. Luckily, the hotel across the street (at a whole £4/night) was clean and bright, with fresh linen and a hot shower.

Next day whilst trying in vain to get a cold fizzy drink, we were taken up by Yousef, an English teacher in Irbid who had lived in the San Francisco in the US (working as a wine salesman – rather ironic, as he pointed out, as he is Muslim). He guided us up to his house where he took us on a tour of his garden and gave us a lesson in bee-keeping. It’s his hobby and he produces delicious honey (certified 100% pure by the Technical University of Amman apparently). He even exports to customers in Kuwait and the gulf. We got to sample it as he fed us a delicious breakfast, complete with oozing, sticky lumps of honeycomb from his hives. He reminisced fondly about his time in California – about how free the US was (“There was a guy across the street – he had a huge poster of the president and it said f**k Bush! You could never do that here!”), how welcoming the San Franciscans had been and how much fun he had had. Still, he had chosen to leave (even before September 11th) because of the way he was treated by other Americans (not people from San Francisco he hastened to add) who were rude and threatening towards him. While we were chatting, his 2 year old daughter sitting on his knee
started to scream and howl. He was baffled until she pointed to the boiled eggs sitting in the middle of our breakfast tray. “Ah, it’s the eggs! She loves them!” and he got her an egg and peeled it for her. She disappeared with it, only to return seconds later with boiled eggy bits all over her face and hands and a huge satisfied smile. Yousef was less impressed – “This is why I hate giving her eggs. She gets it everywhere! All over the house, the walls, the furniture…” Ten minutes later, she had another one, leaving her trail of eggy mess all over the house. Strongly suspect that Emma gave it to her. Feeling guilty, we left Yousef dealing with the mess, promising to return if and when we returned to Jordan

Road to Damascus Experiences

We headed out of Tripoli along the coast. Trying to be clever (once we had taken a wrong turning), we decided to walk along the beach. Wrong option. We ended up slipping and sliding through a thick layer of slime deposited at the end of a huge concrete drain just where it met the sea. To add insult to (near) injury, James timed his exit from the drain badly and got soaked by a huge wave breaking on the end of the drain. We eventually found our way to the old coast road which hugs the shoreline from Tripoli down to Beirut and headed on down towards Batroun. On the way, Tom got caught gawping at two stunning Lebanese girls who got off a bus in front of us. They were obviously flattered at the attention and came to ask us if they could help us. An acutely embarrassed Tom, turning cherry red, stammered "Uh, uh, we were just looking for somewhere to eat". It was only after they had pointed us in the direction of a couple of snackbars and sauntered off down to the beach that Tom thought of the killer line "We were just looking for a couple of gorgeous girls to have lunch with us". Not sure if either of us could have carried it off though, so it was probably just as well.

Stopping for a beer in Batroun, we got talking to an off duty policeman (at least we hoped he was off-duty as he had drunk 3/4 of a bottle of whisky from the looks of things). Whilst we were sitting there, some big scene kicked off with lots of raised voices and gesticulation behind us. Our policeman friend staggered off to investigate, along with half the bar who went to add their own (loud) opinions to the argument. When he came back, we asked him what was going on. He looked at us and said with an air of gravitas "Ils sont des grands poissons et des petits". James nodded sagely at this deeply profound, Cantona-esque comment on human nature. It was only later that Tom pointed out that he had actually said "lls sont des grandes passions et des petits". No less profound, but a bit more fathomable.

Eschewing the bright lights and fancy hotels of Batroun, we opted for the simple life and headed down to the deserted beach to pitch out tent in the shadow of a small cliff. Tom decided that perhaps the simple life wasn't all it was cracked up to be and went off to find the bright lights. James settled down to some quiet reading and fell asleep in his book. An hour later, he was woken by a clearly terrified Tom, who fell through the tent door in a state of panic. "Shhh, shhh! Can you see her? Shhh, shhh! Just be quiet!" he whispered, fear etched into every line of his face. James was too taken aback to do anything other than exactly as he was told and shut up immediately. Some time later, when it appeared the coast was clear, Tom spilled the beans - he had been picked up by a stalker, some lunatic girl sitting down on the beach ready to prey on any innocent foreigner who happened to be passing late at night. She had called him over to talk to her, then refused to let him go away, starting to stroke him and trying to nuzzle him. He had tried to escape, saying he needed to buy cigarettes, but she had produced a full pack and told him he could have hers. When she had started following him back to the tent, he had literally run away and managed to lose her. Or so he thought... Half an hour later, loony appeared outside our tent, demanding to see Tom. When she didn't get a response, she opened the door and tried to get in. Tom, cowering in the bottom of the tent with his sleeping bag pulled over his head, left James to deal with her. Tired, aching and in a foul mood, he gave her fairly short shrift. To do her credit, she did point out that our bags were liable to be stolen if we left them exposed outside the tent and helpfully put them behind the tent for us (bending one of the poles and filling James' rucksack with sand in the process) and she did then leave us alone. Although Tom was to suffer from repeated indecipherable text messages for weeks afterwards - "Tom, moon love blue eyes you king england king my heart". Left with a renewed respect for his sexual magnetism.

Batroun has something of a reputation as a party town - lots of bars open and pumping out music into the warm night sky. It was confirmed next morning when we went to a 24 hour cafe near the beach to find last night's party goers still out drinking beers at 6am and eating the time honoured greasy food hangover cure. From Batroun we headed to the more sedate town of Byblos. Its peaceful exterior hides a turbulent past. Vying with several other cities in the region for the title of "oldest continually inhabited city in the world", it was founded some 7,000 years ago and has pretty much been inhabited ever since (with the odd total destruction thrown in every few centuries to keep the inhabitants on their toes). It gets its name from the Greek word for "book" as it used to be the centre of the papyrus trade in the Mediterranean. Papyrus was shipped from Egypt to Byblos in exchange for cedar wood from the (now all but disappeared) forests of Mount Lebanon.
The remains of all 7 millennia of habitation can be seen from the ramparts of the crusader castle. You can also wander round, but we decided that the castle was more interesting (as well as much shadier) than the foundations of lots of old buildings.

Zeina met us again in Byblos and took us to lunch down by the old crusader harbour in a delicious fish restaurant. Taking advantage of our post-lunch food coma, she kidnapped us and took us back to Beirut for a couple of days of R&R - going to fancy restaurants, swanky roof-top bars and hanging out on beautiful sandy beaches populated with beautiful Lebanese (of both sexes). We of course objected strongly... for all of 2 minutes. In Beirut we were in 7th heaven, particularly as we were able to fulfil many of our food fantasies of the past month - steak frites, delicious pasta (
served by a man bearing a remarkable similarity to Terry Nutkins), sushi and Zeina's mother's delicious home cooking (not a kebab or cheese sandwich in sight). Sadly, the curry remained elusive...

Bidding farewell to Zeina's family, we swung inland North of Beirut and headed up into the mountains. Zig-zagging up the sheer cliffs behind Jounieh, we came to the sanctuary of Our Lady of Lebanon. Here a huge statue of the Virgin Mary looks out over the coastal plain.
It is said that during the civil war, the statue turned on its axis to look towards Beirut and those suffering so terribly there. Unfortunately, no-one seems to have a picture of the statue from before the war so it's impossible to check the story.

Up in the mountains proper, we ran into a couple of farmers who asked us lots of questions about England. "Do you have cows in England? How much is a kilo of beef?... Wow! That's expensive! It's half that price here. Do they have much straw in England [they were carting off several huge sacks of the stuff, so clearly had a professional interest]? Do they sell it a lot?... What? They grow it themselves? But surely they grow lots of straw in the mountains?... What? There aren't any mountains in England? Are you serious?". They left in disgust, bewildered by a country where beef was $20/kilo, you couldn't buy straw for love nor money and there weren't any mountains.
We could understand their disgust at there not being any mountains - the scenery up there was stunning. In between craggy, bare limestone peaks, rich fertile valleys lined with fruit trees and gushing with streams tumbled down to the coastal plain. Reaching the watershed, the high valleys were filled with yellowing grass which shepherds drove their hungry flocks through, picking their way back to their tents
and way down below, the Bekaa valley spread out its pretty patchwork of fields across to the barren slopes of the anti-Lebanon, glowing a deep russet in the evening sun.

Heading down into the Bekaa, we took a morning off to go and visit the ruins at Baalbek. Baalbek is one of the key strongholds of Hezbollah and we were hassled by touts trying to sell us Hezbollah T-shirts or pictures of Hassan Nasrallah. However, the town was less conservative than we had thought it would be - alongside shops selling pictures of Ayatollah Khomeini and the ubiquitous Hezbollah t-shirts were shops selling strappy tops and short skirts, many of the women and young girls were not wearing headscarves and there were not that many thick Islamic beards. The temple complex itself was breathtaking - the sheer scale of the place is mind-boggling. The temple of Jupiter is built on a platform of stone blocks weighing over 1,000 tonnes each. It has been calculated that it would take 40,000 slaves to move just one of those monster blocks. It was by far the largest temple in the Roman world, a symbol of the power and influence of the Roman state in this distant, but extremely important, province. King Herod of Israel donated funds for its building along with a whole line of Roman Emperors. And yet this was never an entirely Roman temple, but was influenced by the alien land in which it was built - typical classical motifs such as Corinthian columns are matched by Eastern symbols such as swastikas (once a symbol of good fortune) and eggs (a symbol of immortality)

It is mind-boggling to think of the scale of conception of its planners. The temple of Jupiter alone took 300 years to build with the labour of something like 10 generations of slaves. Even then, it was never quite finished - with the coming of Constantine and the acceptance of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire in the early 4th Century, building of the pagan temples was stopped and churches were built within the temples to show who was in charge now. Several of the enormous columns from the temple of Jupiter were dismantled and taken to Constantinople to be incorporated into the great Church of Hagia Sophia by the Emperor Justinian. Despite this, the complex is still remarkably well preserved, presumably because the stones it was built with were just too huge to move. Also no doubt because Baalbek fell into obscurity after the Crusaders departed and didn't suffer so much at the hands of future invaders or developers. The Temple of Bacchus
is one of the most complete Classical temples standing.

Sobering news as sat around our short wave radio that night - the Israeli response to the kidnapping of Corporal Shalit had begun with what appeared to be the collective punishment of the entire population of Gaza, with air strikes throughout the Gaza strip, the blowing up of the electricity generator and preparations for a tank incursion into the territory. Out thoughts went out to the poor long suffering Palestinians, but also to Corporal Shalit, his family and the families of the soldiers who died in the militants' attack. A sobering reminder of the unsettled conflicts and the thin line between peace and war in this region. Little did we realise how bad things were going to get and how the conflict would spread to this very place.

The next day, we crossed the border into Syria again. At the border there were lots of holiday makers coming from the heat of the Arabian peninsular and Iran to the relative cool of the coast and mountains of Lebanon. We met a bevy of Iranian ladies sitting gossiping on a wall while they waited for their passports to be stamped. We were both wondering how we could get a photo of them (they looked so photogenic with their faces lit up with laughter), whether we could take one subtly or if it would be incredibly improper to ask them, when they took the matter out of our hands and asked if they could have their photos taken with us. We certainly weren't expecting that one! More giggling all round. Another guy came over to speak to us - this time someone from Baghdad coming to Lebanon for an escape from the madness. More photos taken with us before we got chatting to them. "Ah, yes, we have your BBC world at home. It is wonderful station. Very good. I am watching much The Weakest Link. Is very good. What is she say? Erh, erh... You are the weakest link - goodbye!". Roars of belly laughter all round. I cringed with shame that this is what Britain's best export is these days.

From the Lebanese border we headed into the barren wastes of the anti-Lebanon - not a drop of water to be had. At least until we reached a huge Duty Free complex just before the Syrian border (some 5 miles from the Lebanese). Rather incongruously stopped for Dunkin' Donuts and coffee next to the beautifully manicured lawns outside the air-conditioned complex. All around, bone dry valleys and bare rock walls looked down on us. More of the same until we started to descend into Syria, where there were more fertile valleys and woods giving delightful shade. More Syrian hospitality with stall holders, truck drivers and random passers by handing us peaches and apples. Just as we were beginning to think about settling down for the night, we came to a vast Syrian army barracks stretching all the way along the side of the road. Rather than camp in the woods opposite and risk being arrested and worse (especially given raised tensions in the region), we decided to press on. By the time we reached the end of the base, however, we were well within the urban sprawl of the outer outskirts of Damascus, so we decided to just push on through until we reached the city. It turned into a monster day - 26 miles in total. Reaching the central districts of Damascus, tired, footsore and in need of cheering up, James decided it was time for an emergency moment and checked us both in to the Sheraton hotel for our first night. There is something about walking in to a very fancy hotel looking like a complete tramp - sweat stains and dirt covering your clothes, a greasy sheen and a few days growth of stubble on the face, smelly rucksacks and dirty boots just giving off the faintest hint of the horrific smell festering inside - walking past the glamorous and immaculately turned out wedding guests hanging around in the lobby, and sauntering up to the front desk to ask for a room. The very professional receptionist only allowed the look of horror and disgust to linger on his face for a few seconds before returning to his usual oleaginous self. "Do you have any idea how much our rates are sir?". When James pulled his corporate Amex out of his hat (literally - it has a secret pocket), he looked at us as if we might have stolen it.

Restored after our power shower and a quick lie down on the enormous comfortable beds, we headed down to investigate the "Genuine English Pub" in the basement of the hotel. No warm beer, no teenagers with fake ID gulping down alco-pops, no fruit machines flashing dirty yellow and red lights, no dart board, no fat middle aged men with beer bellies propping up the bar - so much for the typical English pub. They did serve pints and chips though (no pies or chicken in a basket mind) and there was a group of young men in one corner trying to get drunk on a disgusting combination of drinks, so we were reasonably happy.

Next day as we were checking out, we bumped into a rich young Lebanese man and his friend who were returning to Lebanon after few days' holiday in Damascus. He warned us not to stay "Syria is soooo awful man. I mean, like, there's nowhere you can get your hair cut properly, they have no clue about styling and the clubs, they're todally awful - you can't dance on your own, you have to pay like $60 to dance with some Russian girl and then she tells you it's $250 to sleep with her. I mean, it's cheaper in Lebanon! I tell you man, this place is just so uncivilized". It was more like talking to a spoilt Californian teenager than a Lebanese. Luckily, we ignored his advice and spent a very happy couple of days exploring Damascus. James even went to visit one of the "awful" barbers - although only for a shave so can't comment on their lack of styling ability.

The old city is fascinating - a real warren of winding souks and narrow backstreets. Rather than being a sterile museum piece, however, it is still very much a living, working city with its ancient heritage (it vies with Byblos for the title of oldest continually inhabited city) seamlessly incorporated into the fabric of the modern. The main souk which leads down from the citadel to the Umayyad mosque has a corrugated iron roof, peppered with holes from the celebratory firing of the members of the Arab revolt when they swept into the town under King Feisal and Lawrence of Arabia
. Some larger holes commemorate the aerial bombardment of the town by the French airforce when it rebelled against the French Mandate rule in the 1920s. At the bottom end of the Souk, an ancient Roman arch, part of the enclosure of a pagan temple, frames the temple's successor - the magnificent Umayyad Mosque. Built by the Caliph Al Walid between 706 and 715 AD to adorn the new capital of the Muslim world, it is like the Roman's temple complex in Baalbek, a vast demonstration of the power and prestige of the new religion and the new state.
Thousands of skilled artisans were employed in its construction and its scale is huge. The Byzantine emperor himself is said to have sent 200 artisans to help the caliph in its construction (no doubt they were responsible for the beautiful mosaics that cover the walls of the courtyard in gold, greens and blues, showing lush vegetation, flowing rivers and magnificent palaces. And yet again, this is no dead monument, but an active place of worship, a place for meetings, for kids to play, running around the main courtyard
, or just for a peaceful snooze to escape the heat of the midday sun. A man is employed by the mosque authorities to go round the main prayer hall banging a piece of wood to wake those who are too obviously sleeping. Tom sat and watched him do the rounds waking the happy sleepers who pulled themselves upright for just long enough for him to walk out of range, then slumped back into oblivion until he returned again half an hour later. In the centre of the prayer hall is the tomb of John the Baptist, venerated by Muslims and Christians alike as a prophet and the forerunner of Jesus.

The city is still divided into Muslim, Jewish and Christian quarters. The Jewish quarter has mostly emptied since the remaining Jewish population was allowed to leave in 1994, but there are still some 150 Jews living in Damascus (now by choice rather than compulsion), a small reminder of the once thriving multi-cultural. multi-religious community that thrived in Damascus for many centuries. In the national museum, another reminder of the Levantine world left behind - the remains of a third century synagogue, beautifully painted with depictions of bible stories that was found at Dura Europos, a Roman settlement right at the edge of their empire on the banks of the Euphrates river in the far East of Syria. The Christian quarter is still very much alive and well, and peppered with shrines and churches - the house where St Paul is said to have stayed with Ananias following his "Road to Damascus" conversion and a monastery at the site where he was lowered over the city walls to escape from the angry Jewish community.

We met lots of lovely people in Damascus, most of them there to study Arabic, including a wonderful American girl called Andrea, a teacher who seems to spend her summers travelling the world and picking up languages. She already speaks Pharsee, French, Spanish and a whole string of other languages, but had decided to pick up Arabic as well. We first met her at the border where she was jumping into a taxi and wished us luck, only to bump into us two days later as we walked into our hostel in Damascus. We were taken under the wing of her Arabic teacher, a fascinating man called Tariq, who was a lecturer in Engineering at the University of Damascus. I got the impression he did the teaching as a bit of a hobby to meet new people as he seemed to spend almost as much money on taking his students and their friends out for dinner (he refused to let us pay for a thing) as he got from teaching them!

We were also met in Damascus by Trin and Emma who had decided very bravely (having met us once) to entrust their summer holidays to us and join us for the final two weeks from Damascus to Jerusalem. However, they decided that the souks of Damascus were too good a shopping opportunity to miss, so left Tom and I to struggle through the barren heat of the Hauran South of Damascus...

Walked to Jerusalem

With a merry pilgrim band who joined us for the last week into Jerusalem, we walked in to the Old City through the Jaffa gate at 7:45pm last night (Tuesday 18th July) completing a 3,650 mile journey over 8.5 months through 10 countries (and wearing out 4 pairs of boots)

We're alive, well (if slightly footsore) and have been well away from any of the current troubles - thanks to all who have sent concerned messages. More to follow on the blog in the next few days...

Many people have pointed out the irony that we ended our Pilgrimage for Peace just as the worst crisis in some years hit the Middle East. If anything, it just points out that now more than ever peace and reconciliation work is desperately needed in this region. On the way in to Jerusalem we were able to visit Mar Elias in Ibillin and Neve Shalom Wahat al Salam (from where we set off for our final walk into Jerusalem) and saw that despite the desperate situation, Jews, Muslims and Christians, and people from all faiths, can live in peace.

If you would like to donate to the charities for which we are raising money, you can do so at:

www.justgiving.com/walkingtojerusalem

Our huge thanks to all of you who have given us help or succour along the way. And our prayers go out to all those in Israel, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories who are suffering so much at the moment.

Some more specific thanks to Catriona Laing, Emma Latham, James Micklethwait who walked in for the last week, to Clare Adam (who almost made it to Jerusalem but had to get back to England for her brother's wedding), to Ibrahim and Helen Hariri and their family who sent us towards the Syrian border filled with all the best of Syrian hospitality, to Elias, his family and all at Mar Elias in Ibrahim, to Howard and the community of Neve Shalom Wahat al Salam and to Tom's Dad who so expertly arranged our arrival celebrations and relieved us of our bags for the final day's walk.

Alive and Well

Just a very quick one. Thanks to lots of you for concerned emails/texts etc. Just to let you know we are alive, well and a long way from Southern Lebanon, Gaza or the West Bank. Our prayers are with those who are suffering so much at this time - the people of those places, the kidnapped soldiers and their families.

We're in Nazareth, heading towards Jerusalem on the final straight. More to follow....

Lebathon

The evening we crossed the border into Lebanon, we were met by James' girlfriend Zeina who is Lebanese and was on holiday visiting her parents in Beirut. She and her father had kindly driven up from the capital to collect us for an (admittedly slightly early) rest day at their home in Beirut. We spent the day very lazily with only a brief excursion to look around down town Beirut which was on the front line during the 1975 - 1990 civil war. The area has since been heavily redeveloped (mainly by the former president of Lebanon, the late Rafik Hariri's construction company) with some of the buildings torn down and replaced with new; others restored and the odd beautiful Ottoman period houses still standing vacant, pock-marked with bullet holes, an incongrous and tangible reminder of the city's recent past standing amongst the smart commercial buildings and chic bars and restaurants of the area.

We had intended to cross Mount Lebanon (travelling east back towards Syria) by walking up the Qadisha Valley. This dramatic, limestone valley is the heartland of Lebanon's Maronite Christian population and the site of a number of ancient monasteries built into the cliffs the line the valley. Its steep, rocky sides are riddled with hidden grottos, chapels and hermit's dwellings, some of them still inhabited though most of the monks now live in the monastries rather than living a solitary life. The route leads over the mountains to the town of Baalbek in the Bekaa valley beyond. Zeina's father, George, advised us against the route as he said it would take us through territory where the Shi'ite militia group Hezbollah still had a strong presence. They are the only one of the war's militia groups not to have been disarmed and are known to be twitchy about foreigners, particularly at the present time of hightened tensions with the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon and escalating tensions in Gaza.

We decided on a more southerly route to the town of Zahle, south of Baalbak. But we were still keen to see the Qadisha, so decided that instead of starting from the Lebanese border where we'd left off, we would do a stand alone trek up the valley and restart our journey the same number of miles south of the border (i.e. not cheating!).

We took an early bus to the city of Tripoli, at the bottom of the valley, next day and set off walking. On our way, we stopped to visit a strange folly overlooking the valley called "Le Chateau Liban"
. The building, a bizarre construction that looked like a wedding cake made of dark basalt rock, was the brain-child of a Lebanese dentist who has spent his life building and adding to it. We were shown round by the care-taker, who also took us into a metal shed, swelteringly hot inside, that housed an exhibition of wooden scultures by the same man. The pieces on display were as zany as the basalt wedding cake and their artistic value dubious, at least to our eyes. There was a fantastic view of the Greek Orthodox monastery of Hamatoura from the chateau, perched precariously half way up sheer cliff on the other side. A narrow staircase zig-zagged its way up-and-up to it from the valley floor. Certainly a good place for some peace and quiet. You wouldn't get many visitors living there.

We followed a road up the valley until this ran out and turned into a narrow moutain track, precipitous in places, plotting a slightly maverick route to the Maronite monastery of St. Anthony that involved dropping down into the bottom of an adjacent valley and then climbing up the monks' terracing (where they were growing all kinds of fruit) on the other side. Our "commando navigation" skills - highly honed by now, you understand - prevailed and we made it. There was a museum housing printing press
(made in Edinburgh). It had been used to print the Bible in Arabic and was the first ever to be used in the Middle East. Behind was a grotto where the founding monk of the monastery had lived as a hermit. Inside was peaceful and cool. Candles burned by an altar on top of which were some shackles and chains,
apparently used to restrain the insane who were once left here over night in the belief that St. Anthony would cure them. James wandered off into the main monastery whilst Tom explored the dark recesses of the cave. As James stood around in the main courtyard, a grizzled old monk with a stern experssion came over to him and made a "What on earth are you doing" gesture (in Arabic, a simultaneous hand twist and head shake = we see lots of people doing it as they drive past). James started speaking in French, expalining he was was walking on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem with a friend and had stopped to pay a mini-pilgrimage to the Qadisha valley. A blank look and a stream of Arabic. James replies with a shrug and "I'm sorry, I don't speak Arabic". More Arabic, then "Parlete Italiano?". This James could handle - "Poco". Apparently, James had passed some kind of test as the monk's face relaxed into a smile and a stream of perfect French - "You foreigners - the English, but the French are even worse = you never learn any languages. Where did you learn to speak French?", "At school", "Well why don't you learn arabic?". Hard to argue the logic of that one, certainly not without upsetting his national pride, but he didn't really give us a chance to answer anyway - "Everyone should speak at least 4 languages. I don't, but everybody should. We Lebanese are great linguists", and with that he wandered off. We went on to have a look what was behind the lovely facade of the monastery's cave church,
built almost flush to the cliff side.

After we'd seen inside, which was walled and floored with marble remarkably un-cave-like, we went to fill our water bottles at the fountain in the courtyard outside and were approached by a much friendlier-looking monk who asked us if we spoke Spanish (which both of us do, passably). He was from Byblos on the coast and was on retreat at St. Anthony's. He'd been a missionary in Mexico for many years (thus the Spanish). Without being quite aware of how the subject came up, we suddenly found ourselves on the receiving end of a what was obviously a well-polished sermon on "La Ley Naturale" (Natural Law): "The sun rises in the morning and set at night. Man is born and he dies. Can anyone change that? Who can change that?" Theatrical laugh. "No one!... Es la ley (pause) nat-ur-ale!" He went on to apply it to gay marriage (not in favour) and euthanasia (against). To show that he was not a complete reactionary and had a softer side, he introduced some more grey areas - "But there are some problems with Natural law - what about Aids babies? Do they not have a human right to live and be looked after? But who should do this?". A rhetorical question, it turned out, as without pausing he launched into his second moral dilemma with "La ley natural" - "And what about married women who want to work? It is natural law that they should stay at home and look after their families. But a woman may say to her husband "But it is my human right to go out and work" - what is her husband to say to that?" Another rhetorical question. We got the distinct impression that he thought the husband should say "Tough luck, you're staying home to look after the babies - es la ley natural, baby!". Then it was back onto the more certain moral ground of gay marriage. Tom briefly and bravely tried to engage in some debate, but his Spanish wasn't up to it and at any rate Pere Jacques was in full flow, ploughing on through like a bulldozer. Forty five minutes later, the light fading, we decided we should probably start walking to find a bus back to Tripoli.

Playing at Being Knights

It was satisfying, after two months of walking through Turkey, to finally reach the border and cross into another country. Our sense of anticipation at entering Syria turned to one of slight nervousness as we looked at all of the signs at the border post, written in indecipherable Arabic script, and realised the we were linguistically back to square one. Not that we had exactly mastered Turkish on our way through the country, but we had aquired a useful smattering of the language between us and now we wouldn't even be able to read place names! After multiple checks of our passports by officials, an ununiformed man we suspected was a secret policeman stopped and questioned us, writing down our parents' first names and our occupations in his note book before waving us through with a "Welcome to Syria".

Any fears we might have had about how we might be received in Syria had been completely dispelled by the end of our second day in the country. We were walking along the road towards the coastal town of Lattakia and a man came out of a shop by the roadside proffering 2 bottles of orange juice. We'd been unable to change any money and made indications of our empty pockets, but he waved his hand and shook his head as if we were being silly, pushed a bottle in each of our hands and walked back into his shop. A few hundred metres further on we were beckoned over and given pizza by another shop owner who we sat with for a while. Fed and watered, we were continuing on our way when a beat up Skoda van pulled in next to us and the driver asked us where we were from. He was obviously pleased that we spoke English and told us enthusiastically that he'd lived in New York and Fort Lauderdale in Florida. He introduced himself as Nidal and asked us to come and visit him at his ice-cream parlour when we'd reached Lattakia.

We took him up on his offer that evening, showing the taxi driver a piece of paper with Arabic scribbled on it. We ate some of his fantastically good ice-cream in a cosy, sub-terranean den that Nidal had built as part of his cafe. It was walled with rough stones with a jumble of paraphernalia - amphorae and shells -hanging from the walls. He told us about his family abroad: a brother in Ohio and a brother who was a journalist in London, apparently having left because of the difficulties of being a journalist in Syria He was effervescent recounting anecdotes and talking about his experience of living in the states and talking about his favourite places here in Syria. Before we left in a taxi to go back to the hotel, we'd accepted his invitation for him to take us to see the Crusader Castle of Qalat Saladin (inland from Lattakia) in his car first thing next morning, before continuing on our way.

The unscheduled diversion next morning was well worth it. The castle, most of it built by the Crusaders in the 12th century, was quite something. The approaching road runs through a deep cleft in the mountain separating the castle on the right from the rest of the hill on the left
. Staggeringly, given the length and depth of the gorge and the amount of rock it would have taken to move, this is man made. The builders left a needle of rock standing at one end of the gorge to that would have supported a draw bridge. We largely had the ruins of the castle to ourselves to explore. As well as being an king of ice-cream,
Nidal was a keen photographer and we all set about taking pictures from its tall towers and in the atmospheric vaulted chambers and passengers of the castle, where openings in the ceilings above let in shafts of light and ivy climbed its way in.
There were two huge, echoey cisterns and a view that made you feel dizzy from the windows of the keep into the ravine below.

Afterward, we drove back to Lattakia on the coast, stopping for lunch along the way. We said goodbye and thanked him for his amazing hospitality - he hadn't let us pay for a thing - and set off walking into the heat.

A number of people stopped us as we walked out of town, one actually grabbing hold of Tom's hand, shoving it under his arm, turning round and literally dragging him to the side of the road to sit down for tea. We chatted to one guy who spoke particularly good English for a while. He asked us what we thought of Syria. "Frankly!" he emphasised. We told him that we had been overwhelmed by people's friendliness more or less since the moment we arrived. Walking away, we talked about how Syria's reputation as a semi-pariah state and the whole region's reputation for Islamic fundamentalism and conflict is such a contrast to our own daily experience of it. I don't know how many times a day we hear the jolly exclamation of "Welcome to Syria!" often followed by a kind invitation or offer of assistance. People's first instinct upon seeing a foreigner here is one of welcome and hospitality. It is hard not to think how different a reception a pair of travelling Syrians would likely receive in Britain.

Our first stint of walking in Syria hasn't been entirely without upset, however. We were camping on our forth night in the county (a particularly nice spot, on the sun-warmed concrete porch of an half built house on the beach) and were just falling asleep when a torch beam lit up the inside of the tent and we heard loud voices shouting at us in Arabic from outside. Peering out, we saw two boys who can't have been 18 wearing khaki, one of them carrying an machine gun (fortunately, not pointing it at us). One of them asked us something gruffly in Arabic (people sound angry whatever they're saying in Arabic!) We answered in English, establishing the fact there was going to be a communication problem. After talking into his radio, they asked us to come with them and took us to the local cafe where their ununiformed, machine gun-carrying boss was relaxing along with other men folk from the village. Luckily someone spoke English and was able to translate for us. Our passports were inspected and we were asked when we'd entered Syria and what we were doing. We were walking to Jordan, we replied. "You have no other mission here?" He asked. Annoyed at having been woken up and marched through the dark to be asked pointless questions by bored soldiers and petty officials, we were tempted to answer that actually, fair cop, we were carrying out a coastal survey for Mossad... but thought better of it. Eventually we were allowed to go back to bed, only to be woken up by another visit from them half an hour later. They wanted to move us somewhere else. Thoroughly grumpy by this stage, we dug our heels in asking,
"Why?"
"For your security. It is not safe here."
"Why not?"
"...It is dark."
"We've got torches." Followed by much earnest discussion in Arabic. They eventually agreed and left us to sleep, not before time.

After 5 days walking, we had a day off in Tartus, about 20 miles up the coast from Syria's border with Lebanon. We took the opportunity to go and visit the most famous of the Crusader Castles that are dotted throughout this region - Krak des Chavaliers.
It sits on top of a hill overlooking the "Homs Gap", stategically positioned to control the route from the interior of modern day Syria to the coast. Almost completely intact, the fortress looks as though its occupants might have left the day before instead of 700 years ago. It had everything a castle should have: a moat and port cullises; massive inner and outer defensive walls, battlements with arrow slits and machicolations through which boiling oil could be poured on beseigers; and endless passeges and chambers where which would once have accomodated 4,000 soldiers and 400 knights, complete with stables for their horses and a water reservoir and stores for enough food to hold out for 5 years.
After we'd finished exploring the place and pretending to be knights, we went for lunch in a shabby restaurant nearby. Two men in traditional Arab dress, wearing long white robes and kaffiyeh (Yasser Arafat tea towels) on their heads. One took himself to the corner of the restaurant to pray, bowing and kneeling to touch his forehead to the ground, while the other went to the bar and ordered a large whisky and waited for his friend to join him.

After another day's walk out of Tartus and another happy encounter in which we lunched with a man called Hassan who had fathered no less than 14 childen (he showed us a picture)
, we reached the Lebanese border where we would say goodbye to Syria for the first time. We were fairly glowing from our first encounter with Arab culture and hospitality. The border crossings will come thick and fast and it feels like we are within reach of our final destination now...

Sun, Sea and Sweat

We spent a day off in Silifke and decided to go to the tourism office to see if they had any materials on Silifke and the surrounding area. The only information they had was a leaflet produced by the local tourist association that was basically an extended advertorial for the Tolga hotel. The booklet was introduced by the president of the Silifke tourism association, who just happened also to be the proprietor of the Tolga hotel. Most of the booklet was taken up with eulogies on the wonderful facilities on offer at the Tolga, lavishly illustrated with pictures of couples frolicking on the Tolga's private beach and grinning inanely at each other over the hotel bar, pictures of circa-1980 furnished rooms and ancient "conference facilities". Interspersed with these, however, were little nuggets about the surrounding area. "[The Goksu] Delta is the house for the birds to survivo, breed, feed, migrate and temporarily accommodate" and "The Roman-Germen Emperor and the 3 Crusade Mission Commander, Frederick Barbarossa was drawn while trying to cross the Goksu river on the way to Jerusalem". Who would have thought the 2nd crusade could have been brought to a standstill by an illustration. We fared somewhat better than Barbarossa, crossing the Goksu on the old Roman bridge in the middle of Silifke and headed on down the coast.

Up in the mountains the weather had been ideal for walking - never much more than about 25В°C, mostly overcast and cool. Down on the coastal plain it was nearer 35В°, sticky and humid, with a fierce sun beating down. On our first day out of Silifke we were already suffering badly by lunchtime - beetroot red faces, sweat sodden clothes and pounding headaches. Luckily, we stopped for lunch in the little fishing village of Narlikuyu. Here a icy cold spring bubbled up into the crystal clear waters of the harbour so we went for a refreshing swim through alternating bands of icy-cold and sun-warmed water. All followed by a delicious seafood meal and a snooze. Restored, we carried on up the coast to Kizkilezi (or "Fortress of the Maiden") where a thousand year old castle seems to float in the sea 200 metres off shore. The castle was originally built by the Byzantines, but enlarged and rebuilt at the time of the crusades by the Armenian kings of Cilicia. Various legends are attached to the castle, but the one from which it gets its name goes like this: the king heard from an oracle that his daughter would be killed by a snake bite, so he had her locked up in the castle on an island off the coast where he knew there were no snakes. Unfortunately, his chief minister sent a basket of fruit out to the girl in which a snake was hiding, the princess was bitten and died. The locals apparently believe that the snake still lurks on the island ready to bite unsuspecting trespassers.

Once again, James managed to lose the map only this time he failed to find it again, so we were restricted to walking along the busy main road between Silifke and Adana. We stopped on the way in Mersin and Tarsus, the ancient home of St Paul. Mersin is a big, modern port city, but has the huge advantage of an English language bookshop and a Chinese restaurant. After two months of living off kebabs, we were desperate for a change of diet and having run out of reading material in the middle of the mountains, we had been reduced to reading and re-reading our guidebooks and searching for hidden meaning in the ingredients lists on our chocolate bars. Tarsus, despite its venerable history, had little left to show for it. An old well, supposedly in the garden of St Paul's house and some lovely restored Ottoman era houses, plus a few bits of Roman column scattered around.
On the way out of town, we came across a monument to the great Turkish heroes - a series of busts (Alp Arslan, Ghengiz Khan, Tamerlane, Ozman Ghazi, Mehmet the Conqueror, Suleiman the Magnificent) were arranged in a semi-circle around the inevitable bust of the greatest modern Turkish hero - Kemal Attaturk.

Adana, the fourth largest city in Turkey with nearly 2 million inhabitants, is a huge, bustling, hot, sticky industrial city in the heart of a fertile plain. In Adana, we were joined by Tom's girlfriend Kate, who decided to come and check that we weren't living out her "Brokeback Mountain" nightmares and to see for herself what Tom was willingly putting himself through.
We got an incredibly warm welcome in Adana from Firat Sezginsoy, the brother of one of James' colleagues. Firat was demob happy, having just finished his military service with the marines in Izmir and told us great stories of life in the military. Apparently, the military (as staunch defenders of the secular state) refuse to stock products made by companies they perceive as islamist. Given that most edible consumer goods we have eaten in Turkey are produced by one of these companies, their diets must be a bit restricted.

Cenk, Firat's brother, had given him strict instructions to ensure we had the best Adana kebab in the world. Firat was as good as his word - he took us to his favourite "hole in the wall" kebab shop where he held forth on his theory of kebabs - "they are no good if they are healthy and eaten in some fancy restaurant - they always taste much better if they're swimming in grease and eaten in some seedy kebab joint". Sure enough, the rolls of bread filled with grilled kebabs of minced lamb and hot red chilli, crammed with mint, salad and fresh tomatoes and oozing thick slicks of orange-coloured fat were delicious. Firat introduced us to the owners and told them what we were doing - "oh yes, we know all about them - we read about them in the paper" they replied. Apparently, there was a story a couple of weeks ago about 2 English guys walking through Turkey so we have become media stars. Next stop was a bakery for Kunefe - a sort of cheese pie, topped with shredded wheat and fried, sprinkled with icing sugar then liberally smeared with clotted cream. After that, we were good for nothing but an afternoon snooze. Cenk rang to check up on Firat and make sure he had followed up his instructions

Cenk - "How was your kebab James?"

James - "Delicious - better than anything else I've had"

Cenk - "Well, I did promise you the best kebab you've ever had.....I can't promise you you won't spend the whole of tomorrow in the bathroom, but that wasn't part of the deal".

Luckily, our stomachs appear to have become immune to such things (hopefully not famous last words) and we were able to walk out of Adana into the cotton growing plains beyond. Walking along beside a deep, fast flowing irrigation ditch, Tom decided that he fancied swimming some of the way to Jerusalem so stripped off and slipped into the water, leaving poor Kate to carry his bag. He scarcely had to kick his legs to keep up with us and had a lovely 30 minute refreshing swim, carried along by the current.

Early the next morning, we were stopped by a guy on the back of a tractor with the usual "Where are you from? Where are you going?" question. Expecting the usual nod, awkward pause whilst the person addressing us realised he didn't know any more English and we searched our limited Turkish vocabulary for something suitable to say, then the wave and farewells, we were completely taken aback when he replied "****ing 'ell that's a long way!". It turned out he had just returned from England where he had been living (illegally) for a year and a half in Streatham, running a market stall in Whitechapel. When the police finally caught up with him, he had been offered the chance of returning to Turkey or going to Germany (where he had the right of residence). He had chosen to come back to Turkey, allegedly saying to the police "Germany? What I want to go there for? Eez crap".

Beyond Adana, we reached the North-East Corner of the Mediterranean in the fold of the Bay of Iskenderun and reached a significant milestone when we finally turned due South to head towards Jerusalem. This moving and momentous moment was slightly spoiled by the stinking and rubbish strewn beach we were walking along (complete with rotting carcass of a dead turtle), the view of heavy industrial emplacements spread out along the coast (oil refineries, steel works, phosphate plants etc.) and the thick layer of grime coating us, our clothes and our baggage that had been spewed out of the chimneys of a mega plant complex producing an odd combination of chromium, bricks and petrol.

In Payas, further round the gulf, we stumbled upon the magnificent Mehmet Sokullu Pasha Complex - a huge, fortress like Caravanserai complex built by the Grand Vizier of Suleiman the Magnificent. It was something of a declaration of Ottoman power and prestige in a land that had only recently been conquered by the Ottomans at the time. The complex contains a mosque, a hamman, a covered bazaar and endless courtyards for the accommodation, feeding, watering and storage of merchants, pilgrims, their livestock and wares. It should by all rights be a major tourist destination, so impressive is the complex, but the huge steelworks dominating the town to the South deters all but the most determined (or foolhardy) of visitors. We were shown round by two lovely Turks, who had bumped into us on the outskirts of Payas and wanted to practice their English. They had recently been made redundant by the local steel plant and were now trying to set up a trade union to get some redress. A somewhat risky business when the steelworks is apparently owned by the military and tradesunions are forbidden.

Walking out past the steelworks, we were called over to the gate by a very strange man looking a bit like a cross between Mr. Bean and Jasper Carrot, balding and wearing a pair of very tight bright green trousers. As we stopped to see what he wanted, he started moving his body in an incredibly fluid motion. Leaning back at an alarming angle, one hand behind his head, smiling with a lewd grimace and making strange "eh, eh, eh" sounds, he started to perform the most incredibly pelvic thrust, whipping his whole body into it and pumping away. We were too stunned to even think of taking a photo (unfortunately) then just collapsed into fits of giggles.

Not much to see in Iskenderun, founded by Alexander the Great following his decisive victory over the Persians at nearby Issos, except for an early morning exercise class
being held on a huge public square in the middle of the city. Tempted to join in for the comedy value, but star jumps with 20 kg on your back probably not a very good idea.

Very relieved to head back up into the mountains to escape the heat of the coast and head in land towards Antioch. Our relief was fairly short lived, however, as, having ignored the warnings of pretty much everyone we met that the road didn't go anywhere, we continued on regardless until our path ran out 600 metres above sea level in a meadow surrounded by pine trees. Tried to console ourselves that it was actually a lovely picnic spot and really it was a good thing that we had walked all this way in the burning heat just to have to turn around and go back down as we needed the mountain climbing practice. Don't think we were fooling anyone though, least of all ourselves. We then had the added humiliation of having to walk back down through several villages to be met with lots of "I told you so...." expressions. Luckily, the villagers were far too polite to rub it in and instead invited us for tea, ice-cold water and delicious greengage figs. Evidently, we had gatecrashed some important village meeting as the entire male population was gathered together in the shade of the mosque discussing weighty matters. Or rather, the village head man, backed up by the local hajj, was holding forth to the rest of the village, whilst they nodded sagely and muttered agreement, apart from a few poor dissenters who raised feeble objections, only to be knocked down by the force of the headman's rhetoric.
No idea what was going on, despite our attempts to find out from the imam (a gently, scholarly looking man with two pairs of glasses draped round his neck).

We finally found the right path over the mountains, pointed in the right direction by the mayor of Arsuz, rather unusually for Turkey, a Christian. This part of Turkey has a sizeable Greek Orthodox population absorbed into Turkey when Attaturk annexed the small Arabic speaking state of Antioch in the late 1930's, from the French Mandate territories. Once again, we headed up into the mountains, climbing to over 1,500 metres in the hot sun
. The following morning, disaster struck as we ran out of water, still some 6 hours walk from Antioch, and with all the springs dry. There wasn't a drop of water to be found. Just as we were getting seriously worried, we heard the babble of a brook and stumbled towards it through the undergrowth, half delirious with relief. We downed several pints each and filled out bottles, hugely relieved. Until, that is, we found the source of our stream a kilometre further up. We arrived at what we thought was a well to find a strange man lying in bed under a tree. He leapt up, wearing a only a string vest and pair of Y-fronts and invited us over for tea in Spanish. He offered us water, so we started to move towards the well - "Oh no, don't drink that, it's not good - it comes from the chromium mine". It turned out our beautiful clear mountain stream bubbling up from a mountain well was in fact the waste water being pumped out from a mine. We went white as a sheet and started to feel queasy, until he reassured us that we'd probably be ok. Now mercifully clothed, he fed us delicious water melon and tea. He apologised (at 8am!) that he didn't have any raki for us to drink, but he had finished his last bottle (all of it) the night before. He said he had been bitten by a snake and, before we could stop him, pulled down his trousers to show us two ugly red puncture marks in the back of his leg. "Oh, it's ok" he said, "I just poured some raki on it and drank the rest of the bottle - it was fine". He had worked as a bulldozer driver all over the Arab world and in Spain (hence the Spanish), but now worked this little chromium mine apparently on his own. The story was quite confusing at this point, but it appeared he used to have people working for him, but they had died in an accident, so now he mined on his own, spending a week up at the mine and a week back in Adana with his family. We left him with half a bottle of whisky, much to his delight. Later that day, he passed us in a pickup truck and stopped to thank us again for the whisky. judging from the smell of his breath and his flushed face, it hadn't lasted very long.

The path down the other side of the mountain was a really windy, hairpin bend affair, squiggling down the mountain like a piece of spaghetti.
Arriving hot and bothered at the bottom, we were invited for yet another cup of tea by a young man who had just graduated from University as an English teacher. We had a long chat with him about how he had won a scholarship to a school in Kaiseri, then come back to study at University in Antakya (Hatay/Antioch) and was now waiting to find out where the government would post him as a newly qualified teacher. He showed us one of his text books, which was from a course all about Britain. It was really very comprehensive, discussing the political system, the education system, health care, etc. Quite odd to read all about Britain from the perspective of a non-native. In the section on culture, it said "People in other countries usually just get sleepy when they drink alcohol. In England, however, they get violent and go out and look for a fight".

Finally, we arrived in Antakya, the ancient Antioch ad Orontes where the early church community under St Peter and St Paul first got the name of Christians. We visited the cave-church of St Peter where the early Christians used to meet. It is carved into the mountains (the Mountain of the Cross) on the edge of Antioch, complete with escape passage carved through the rock and out onto the mountainside dating from the Roman persecution. The front of the cave was covered with a beautifully simple Romanesque front by the crusaders.
We received a plenary indulgence for our troubles, granted by Pope Paul VI to all who visit the church when he preached mass in the cave in 1967. Despite being absolved of all our sins thus far, we didn't feel much different walking back into town to see the archaeological museum. Didn't take us long to put ourselves back into a state of sin giggling at the rude mosaics on display in the museum.
We joined the small Catholic community in their little church (housed in a couple of Ottoman period houses in the old town area of Antioch) and were welcomed with unbelievable kindness, treated to tea and taken out for dinner afterwards by some of the parishioners. A lovely evening with a Turkish family who had converted from Islam. Although Antioch is a fairly tolerant place, with Christians and Muslims living peacefully side-by-side for generations, this tolerance is not apparently extended to converts. The family had endured abuse and worse at the hands of the Muslim community and although they had the support and help of the catholic community, it is a very small community and they live in constant fear. Yet despite all this, they remained unbelievably positive and filled with life and happiness. We felt really humbled by their incredible resilience and the depth of their faith.

We set off rather later than intended the next day after an unexpectedly late night, which meant we got breakfast in our hotel and Tom got to meet properly the poor middle aged Australian lady he had walked in on the previous day, mistaking her room for ours. She was extremely sweet about it and not at all embarrassed. Unlike Tom, who went a deep scarlet colour and mumbled out profuse apologies.

Heading towards the border, after 2 months of cheese and tomato sandwiches occasionally supplemented with kebabs and salad, we started to have food fantasies - "Wouldn't you just love a Sunday roast, with all the trimmings, roast potatoes, parsnips, gravy and some really stodgy pudding like treacle sponge.... Or a curry, a nice spicy greasy curry.... Mmmm, a fry up - full English breakfast with HP sauce, just think of all that pork....". Unfortunately, it was back to the cheese and tomato sandwiches, with, yes, you've guessed it, a kebab the following lunchtime. The kebab restaurant, 1km from the border, was actually very good and in a lovely location, in a clearing in the middle of a beautiful pine forest. Got a bit of a surprise when the proprietor greeted us with a "Sorry mate, what do you want to eat?" in a strong Mancunian accent - he had lived for several years in Manchester and chatted away with Tom about Preston and Stockport. He also introduced us to the head of customs, the chief of police and the regional military commander who were all having lunch in his restaurant. It ensured us a smooth passage over the Turkish border at least, but we were both a bit anxious about what awaited us on the other side in Syria...

Toros Traverse

We had originally planned our own "Haute Route" across the Toros, heading in a straight line from Konya through the highest peaks of the Bolkar Toros and dropping down directly into Adana. However, this would have meant a whole week pretty much in the middle of nowhere and the thought of a) the embarrassment as our loved ones back in England tried to mobilize the entire apparatus of the Turkish State to find us when we were quite happily trotting through the mountains and b) carrying an entire week's supply of food on top of our already overloaded bags made us rethink our plans. Instead, we opted for a lower level route, dropping South from Konya, down to Silifke and then up the coast to Adana.

There was nothing mountainous at all about the plain South of Konya. Although we were up at 1,000 metres, the landscape was as flat as a pancake. We could see for miles, all the way across to the various mountain ranges ringing the plain. A particularly bad moment to get caught in a thunderstorm and realise that WE were the highest point for 5 miles in every direction. Forks of lightning streaked across a foreboding black sky as we headed across the plain as fast as we could for a village we could make out on the horizon line. Soon the rain began and then big stinging hail stones whipped across our bare legs. Then as soon as it began, the rain stopped as the storm clouds divided and rolled on down the two ridges of mountains running down either side of the plain, leaving us more or less untouched in the middle.

Although we had escaped the storm, we still had to contend with the fact that we were in the middle of nowhere and had no food for the night. Problem solved by a kind old shepherd, who when we asked if we could have some bread, took us back to his house and fed us a full meal (delicious home grown tomatoes and cucumbers, rice, bread and a steaming hot chicken, bean and tomato casserole).

Rather than take the easy route to Karaman straight across the plain, we decided to detour over the flanks of an extinct volcano to visit Binbirkilise ("A thousand and one churches"), two Byzantine settlements with a large number of churches and cells made from the volcanic rock around. Discovering that the main concentration of churches required an 8km detour uphill, we opted to just look at the churches around the modern Turkish settlement of Madanşehri. This was once a thriving community, which minted its own coins. Arab and Turkish invasions appear to have forced the citizens further up the mountainside to Binbirkilise itself, away from the prying eyes of marauding bands (and exhausted pilgrims). In Madanşehri, successive settlers had incorporated much of the previous settlement into the new village - many of the houses looked like they had just been repaired and re-used and the ruins of one beautiful granite church had been incorporated into the wall around someone's property. One ruined church, which must have been huge in its prime, stood away from the rest of the settlement in the middle of fields. Standing next to the atmospheric old ruins, gazing down to the cloud-mottled plain 300 metres below was a moving experience.

Despite only being 3 days out of Konya, we arrived in Karaman (biscuit capital of Turkey) exhausted. Clearly having two days off in Konya had turned us soft. Must be all that pampering in the Turkish bath. We decided to have half a day off to prepare ourselves for the mountains which began abruptly after Karaman. James took advantage of the morning off to visit the barber and have a full shave and haircut - abandoning the messy beard and long hair of last year in favour of something cooler for the heat of the Eastern Mediterranean. Unfortunately, he got the barber's apprentice who apparently had only mastered one hairstyle so far and hadn’t quite got the hang of how to wield a cut-throat razor. He emerged an hour later sporting a 1930's haircut, super-short hair brylcreamed to his scalp with a perfect side parting scraped through it, a red raw neck and blood pouring from a nick in his upper lip.
Tom supportively collapsed in hysterics and took lots of pictures.

We were in Karaman for Turkish National Day, which coincided with the funeral of a judge apparently killed by an Islamic militant for making a judgement against the wearing of headscarves in school and university. We had spoken to our medical school friends in Konya about this, who were very much in favour of lifting the ban. The issue really seems to draw out the fault lines in modern Turkey between the secular state and islamists. Our medical student friends reckoned that something like 40% of the population are strongly Muslim. Most of them would I am sure have condemned the lawyers action and it seems to have had the opposite effect from that which he intended, bringing thousands of people on to the street in defence of the secular state.

Leaving Karaman, the mountains proper began (once we had escaped the main road and its multiple biscuit advertising hoardings). The strenuous climbs were particularly uncomfortable for James as the sweat ran into the raw skin left from his scrape with the apprentices razor. Up here we felt further away from the modern world than we have yet. We passed through a village where several people were still living in caves, the entrances filled in with stone walls and wooden doors. With satellite dishes attached (no getting away from modernity completely). Up in the high valleys, families of shepherds tended to their sheep around their goat hair tents as they must have done for generations.

High up on the mountain side, unsure of where exactly we were, we caught sight of a vulture circling slowly over head. Visions of us, collapsed from exhaustion, slumped against the rocks, bidding each other stoical British farewells ("Well, I suppose this is it old man, toodle-pip and all that") whilst the vulture hopped gleefully from one to the other, selecting which juicy bit to get stuck into first, flashed briefly through our heads before we saw (or rather smelled) it's real object of interest - a dead sheep carcass, rotting and flyblown next to the path

Dropping off the tops and into a beautiful green valley with a bright mountain stream running down the middle, we were shouted over by a bunch of people running a trout farm. They were just preparing a banquet of fresh trout straight out of the water, seasoned with chilli and salt and barbecued out in the open. They invited us along and we gorged on the delicious fresh fish, doused in lemon and wrapped in flat bread, accompanied with finely chopped onion and cucumber. Delicious! We declined their offer of a lift down the valley with great difficulty - they couldn't understand why anyone would want to walk (even on such a glorious sunny afternoon) - and continued on towards the town of Dağpazarı. We reached it the following day and breakfasted in the ruins of another Byzantine church. This one looked as if it were in imminent danger of becoming even more ruinous, with huge gaps between the stones in the apse which the morning sun streamed through. Evidence of old settlements abounded - a marble column holding up the balcony at the back of someone's house, piles of old masonry lying around and what looked like an old caravanserai in the dusty main square. From Dağpazarı, we anticipated a couple of days out in the wilderness, so decided to stock up on supplies. Perhaps in retrospect 5 loaves of bread, half a kilo of pasta, half a kilo of cheese, a foot of sausage, 5 tomatoes and a kilo of chocolate was a little excessive, but at one point as we wandered along the tops at 1780 metres heading in exactly the opposite direction from the one we wanted and with no obvious route out, it looked like we might be needing it all. No vultures this time, just a truck full of unhelpful people giving us impossible to follow directions and, to add to our misery, a rainstorm. Undaunted, (well, maybe slightly daunted), we pushed on and thanks to our navigation skills (or more likely sheer luck), we found our way again, the sun came out and we found a beautiful campsite in a high meadow, flat as a board and with lovely springy grass underfoot. Which was just as well as by now James' thermarest had sprung a leak and all attempts to fix it had failed in a mess of sticky sealant. The springy grass at least meant that he only woke up 3 times in the night having to re-inflate the mattress.

Hitting the road down to Silifke, Tom spotted a beautiful plunge pool underneath a waterfall in a spectacular limestone gorge. Scrambling down the side of the old Roman bridge still carrying the road across the gorge, we stripped off and went for a wash in the icy cold waters of the stream. Tom made a feint to jump in with James, then scampered up the bank to get his camera and revenge for an earlier picture James took of Tom skinny dipping near Istanbul. Modesty was mercifully preserved by a fortunate splash of water.

By now we had crossed the watershed and were heading down the Southern face of the Toros. With it we lost the cooler weather of the Anatolian plain and began to get the searing heat and unbroken sunshine of the Mediterranean coast. Shepherd fountains which further up were still gushing cold sweet water were here already dry for the summer and we had to rely on bottled water. By the time we reached the village of Uzancaburç (the ancient holy city of Olbia , dedicated to Zeus and ruled by a dynasty of priest kings), it was getting on for 30 degrees and we were beginning to suffer in the heat. We still had the energy to wander through the magnificent ruins of the temple of Jupiter, admire the huge tower (part of the old city's defensive works - about 20 metres high) and pose for silly photos in the impressive remains of the ancient theatre. However, after walking for 8 days without a proper break (bar a half day of 24 kilometres) through the mountains, we decided to do something sensible and took a minibus from there to the coast to have a day off in the city of Silifke. On the way down to Silifke, the man next to us (a typical "spy", with a white beard and a little wooly hat) pointed at Tom's shorts, patted him on the leg and rubbed his fingers together in what we took to be the universal symbol for money and nodded knowingly. We were a bit puzzled by this - our various interpretations were A) "Are you too poor to afford proper trousers like these baggy ones I’m wearing?", B) "Are those shorts expensive?" or C) (which we didn't really want to contemplate) that he was making indecent proposals and offering money in return. Luckily, the man behind us, who spoke some English, translated for us:

"He says look at the ancient Roman monuments" and pointed to a series of spectacular mausolea carved into the cliffs and perched on the tops of the hills, all classical pediments and stately columns. How the old man's hand gestures could possibly translate into that, we had no idea.

We arrived in Silifke in the middle of its annual cultural festival. All the surrounding villages set up a tent in the middle of the town to show off their cultural highlights and serve tea and traditional dishes; in the evenings they compete in some kind of traditional dance competition up on a stage in the centre of town. On the plus side, the town was buzzing with people promenading up and down by the river, visiting the tents and enjoying the atmosphere. On the downside, all the hotels in the centre were booked out by traditional dancers and we had to stay miles away out near the bus station. The sudden rush appeared to have caught the local restaurants unprepared. We went for dinner to the restaurant of the Göksu hotel, where we were given a lavishly illustrated menu several pages long listing the culinary delights on offer. Everything we asked for was met with a negative "yok" ("there is not") by our waiter. In frustration, we asked him what there actually was, whereupon it emerged that all they actually had was chicken kebabs and salad, so we settled for that with very bad grace, ate up quickly and then went off to watch the traditional dancers. Unfortunately, as we arrived, they were ushered off stage and replaced by the compère - a dreadful woman looking a bit like the bride of Frankenstein (so much make up and bad plastic surgery) with permed fake blond hair piled on the top of her head which must have required a can of hairspray to keep it in place. She seemed far more intent on self-promotion to the bored looking citizens of Silifke than on providing any entertainment and not even the prospect of seeing her stray too close to the lights and her hair going up in fireball could make staying and listening to her bearable so we headed off to bed to prepare for the heat of the coastal plain.