on the road

So my travelling has begun! The last week in Amman was pretty full on and unfortunately had a bit of an incident with some people living in our apartments, so for safety myself and my roommate moved in with Rohan and Sandi and Amelia for the last few days. Rohan and Sandi are the lovely, amazing people who took all of us in for Christmas. It was so nice of them to have Alyson and I for the last few days. I have learnt so much from this family over the past 2 months, which I am so grateful for.

So Belinda, Jo and I left at about 9am on Thursday morning. We headed to Abdali bus station in downtown amman, but we missed all the buses to Damascus by about half an hour. It was pretty funny actually. We got taxis right down to the bottom of the station and ended up hiking, with ALL our luggage to the top of the hill for a couple of kilometres... In the end we got a service taxi which only cost 10JD each and took about 2 hours off the time it would’ve taken if we had caught the bus.

Once in Damascus we stayed in the Sultan hotel near the Hijaz Station. Some of the guys stayed in this hotel last time we were in Syria. It’s was a nice, clean hotel and had hot water, so we decided to go there again. After ditching our bags we took Belinda to the main Souq’s and places we visited when we were there after Christmas. We had dinner at Jabri House again as well. It’s a really beautiful restaurant that has fairly cheap food.

This morning we woke up early at 6am, woke up the poor hotel staff sleeping on the couch in the foyer to get breakfast. Surely they could have scored themselves a room, but I guess they need someone maning the desk 24/7. Breakfast was included and they gave us enough bread so that we could made ourselves Vegemite rolls for lunch. Then we headed to the bus station and hunted for a bus to Turkey, but soon found out that there were no buses direct to Turkey until 10pm! So we got on a bus to Aleppo for 4.5 hours. My seat was wet and we couldn’t work out why until it really started bucketing down with rain and it started pouring through a crack above my head! So I moved seats. Once in Aleppo we searched fr a bus to Turkey and this time there were none until 5am the next morning! We really didn’t want to stay the night in Aleppo, so we found a service taxi that would take us across the border.

And it was the best decision we made! It was a nice, new car, and our Turkish driver was so lovely! When we got to the border crossing it was chaos! The border crossings I’ve been through so far have separate lanes for buses and trucks and cars and taxis...well this was insane, it was everyone on a two way road... So one lane in one direction and it was hell!!! Our taxi driver was awesome though and managed to weave in and out of all the buses and trucks... And pissed a few people off in the process as we skipped about 2km of line up! Haha... And the Syrian guards found our Arabic hilarious, but they didn’t make us open up all our bags, which is good, ‘coz it’s such a pain. One guard asked us “Do you have anything not good?” And we are all like “la, la (no no)” and laughed.

I can really tell that my Arabic has improved since I’ve travelled through Jordan and Syria. Most of the time when we travel, everything has been organised for us through Hakeem, so we don’t get to do any kind of bargaining. This has been so much fun so far. As soon as we speak Arabic they’re taken by surprise, and usually lower the cost. Then we pull the ‘taalibaat!!!’ (students!) in a whiny voice and plead with them, and we get the price we want. One guy asked us what we were studying and when we said Arabic, he dropped the price instantly. I think they seem to have a lot more respect for us when we use arabic.

So yeah, then we got through the turkish border and by the way it has been pouring down with rain non-stop since we entered Aleppo. So our bags were drenched...shoes drenched... Our taxi driver took us to the hotel I’m writing from right now called Divan Oteli. This was the hotel recommended in the lonely planet(LP) guide, and we are really impressed so far. Clean, hot water and heating (which we need tonight because some of our clothes got drenched in our bags, still trying to work out how...). So yeah. After we got here we chilled for a bit ‘coz we’d been on the road since 8:30am until 6pm. Then we ventured out for some food. There was a nice restaurant (again LP reco) and it was cheap too. I had lentil soup and some spinach and tomato spiced bread thing. Then on the way home we went to the supermarket to grab some things, and they had turkish delight, and we though it was kind of fitting to eat turkish delight on our first night in Turkey, so we got some and it was delicious!!! Best I’ve ever had... You’d wanna hope so too seeing as I’m in Turkey and all.

But so far Turkey has been very very pretty! Reminds me a lot of the Adelaide Hills. It’s so green! And the houses are very European style. It’s hard to think that we only just left the desert and Arab speaking world. We keep talking in Arabic here! They actually understand us! Which is great, coz no one here speaks English. It was funny even with our taxi driver, whose first language is Turkish, and our first language is English, but yet the only way we could communicate was in Arabic! The same thing happened again in the restaurant tonight. But the further west we travel the less we will be able to use Arabic unfortunately.

Well tomorrow we leave for Cappodocia, so we will probably be travelling again for another 8 hours. So I’d better get some sleep!


Love carly