Les drivers – Syria’s most cherished treasure

It is about time I shared my most cherished memories of Syria – those of the four drivers my mum and I had the honour to meet during our trip. Without them, getting to many of the places we visited would have been difficult, although as they were driving us across vast Syrian dessert landscapes, I was feeling exactly the opposite.

Let me start with Jamal, a blue-eyed blonde monsieur, who shattered my prejudice about all Arabs being brunets. He was to pick us up at our Dead Sea resort in Jordan and drive us to Damascus. We arranged for him through my friend Bashar, who moved back to Jordan a few months prior to our visit, having lived in the U.S. for the past 11 years. Bashar’s background wouldn’t have a place in this story, were I not trying to emphasise that he was almost as clueless about driving arrangements in the Middle East as my mum and I were. (Sorry Bashar, you know that I love you and that I am grateful for the experience!)

Bashar handled all the communication with Jamal, the driver, prior to our trip and told us that he spoke some English. Half an hour before he was to pick us up, Bashar asked if it was o.k. for Jamal to take “his client’s son” to Damascus with us. We said yes although I am sure our say wouldn’t have made a difference. He would have taken him anyway. Half an hour later we were speeding up a Jordanian highway in the backseat of a comfortable Chevrolet old-timer with Jamal and “his client’s son” Zahir, a good looking young lad who seemed thoroughly disinterested in anything but his mobile phone. He claimed to speak little English, but his “little” seemed advanced in comparison to Jamal’s “some”. They showed no sympathy for my pathetic attempts at communication in Arabic either, so I soon realised we were expected to travel in silence.

First, we spent an hour circling around Amman, where Jamal was meeting random people at random places that were giving him plastic bags to stuff into “our” trunk. Just before the Syrian border, he stopped at another couple of dodgy looking locations to pick up “things in bags”. At that point he also put up sunshields on the back windows. As this had nothing to do with the sun, I concluded that he was attempting to compensate for the fact that mum and I were not wearing headscarves. I was probably wrong. Or maybe not. I will never find out so it doesn’t really matter.

At the border, Zahir pulled out an American passport. As my lack of diplomatic tact and wisdom always comes out in the worst possible moments, I screamed astonished “You are American!” He just smiled and nodded at which point I started to suspect that he was not as disinterested in communication as it seemed initially. The instructions came from above (read Jamal). At that point I was starting to feel a little uncomfortable. Forms, more forms, exit fees, stamps, four checkpoints and we were finally out of Jordan. We stopped at a fancy duty free shopping centre to recover from the Jordanian border and prepare for the Syrian one. To this day I muse over its architecture and hygiene, all alone out there with perfumes and make up in apocalyptic surroundings.

Jamal and Zahir were gone for at least half an hour while mum and I sat in the car. Mum claimed that the boy was raised in the U.S. and that his American culture was obvious from his behaviour and body shape. I was not sure whether to blame it on globalisation instead, but his passport was confusing me. He said he was from Damascus so wouldn’t he use a Syrian passport to enter his own country? Within that half an hour of waiting for them to drop off or collect some stuff in no man’s land (I lost track of which bags were new and which were old), mum and I got as far in our conspiracy theories as Zahir being an American spy. At the same time, we were sure that Jamal and Zahir were related, since they had quite an intimate relationship, judging by Jamal’s orders to the boy. “Hold this”, “put this there”, “pass me that”, it went on and on during the entire trip. We settled on the idea that they were most likely smuggling something. To make matters even stranger, as I was coming back to the car from the toilet, I noticed that our Chevy plates were light blue. They were Syrian, yes, but their background was not white like on all the other cars around us.

Another few forms and checkpoints and we entered Syria. I was relieved that we were not arrested at the border. You can call me paranoid, but it looked like Jamal was relieved too. Maybe it was the half an hour in the duty free toilet that did it for him, but my feeling of relief certainly had a strong positive correlation with getting away from the Syrian frowning customs officers.
As we entered Damascus I asked for a cash point, since we needed to get Syrian money to pay for the ride. Jamal pulled over and said something that resembled “Go with my uncle” at which point I got out of the car with Zahir “the American”. I now had my confirmation that Jamal and Zahir were somehow related, so one piece of the puzzle was solved. In those few minutes away from his uncle, Zahir started to smile and we began casual small talk. His English was fine but definitely not fluent. He said he lived in Damascus and that it was always either packed with people and cars or deserted, later on at night. As Jamal arrived, with my mother and our suitcases, we re-entered the car and fell back into silence.

We spent another hour looking for our hotel in the old town, since Jamal had no clue where he was going and which street was which. He started hissing and puffing which picked up in intensity once he found out I didn’t have the telephone number of the hotel. I felt young and guilty, although I wasn’t sure why. 45 minutes later, Zahir decided to use his dearest mobile phone to find out the number of the hotel and lazily handed it over to Jamal once he got through. In an act of compromise, the hotel staff met us at the Bab Sharqi gate to the old town. We were rushed out of Jamal’s Chevy in the middle of a busy intersection and walked over to the hotel, which was 5min away. With my back to Jamal and Zahir, I bounced around in happiness until my foot fell through a hole on the road and I twisted my ankle. I limped to the hotel thinking to myself “Welcome to Damscus”. Little had I known then that it was only going to get worse.

An epilogue to this part of my drivers’ experience: we later found out from unverified sources that those blue car plates were for cars which did not pay for VAT and that they were often used to smuggle goods from neighbouring countries. And as for Zahir “the American”, we were told that he must have been Palestinian, since they were not allowed to enter Syria.

Three days later, we met Munzir, our second driver. We spent two days with him, one visiting monasteries outside Damascus and the other on our way to Palmyra. He was supposed to also drive us to Allepo the following day, but we were so thoroughly bored of him after those two days that we decided to ditch him and get someone else (which turned out to be a vital mistake). Munzir was actually ok, now that I think of it. He had lived in Dubai for 5 years, but came back to Damascus because his government job as a nurse would not have waited for him longer (Yes, they wait for you long in these socialist countries, ha?! That’s what I call job security!). He talked even more than I did, and it was proper bullshit. He was obsessively negative about his life and he passionately hated his country. All he needed was a foreign wife to get him out of there. All the riches were waiting for him in America, or even better, in Europe. Once I accidentally mentioned that I lived in London for five years, he frantically turned around and asked whether I had their passport. I had to disappoint him and promise to “bring” him my friend instead. He wouldn’t leave us alone for a minute and our patience with him maxed out after those two days.

After a fun day and night in Palmyra, which I described in my previous blog entry, we set off to Allepo with our driver number 3. By that morning I grew quite accustomed to testicle touching and stretching while being served food from the night before, that I was a little slow to react to the grotesqueness of our latest driver. If I had to describe Ahmad in two words, I would say he was young and crazy. He spoke no English but that turned out to be the least of my worries. We were to stop at a number of ancient sites and locations on our way to Allepo, so we took a long detour, which took around 10 hours to cover. Initially he only started staring at me via the car mirror. He winked and flirted and kept showing that he wanted me to take my sunglasses off so that we could exchange glances. I tried to ignore him but he would not stop. Mum could not see anything as she was sitting behind him and was not feeling very well. The first castle we made a stop at, he got out of the car and pissed onto the World Heritage, following which we quickly decided to move on. An hour later we were in Rasafa, a Byzantine ruins archaeological site. I roamed around alone as mum stayed in the “coffee shop” outside. He followed me inside and as he was getting closer, I could hear some strange sounds from his mobile phone, which he was pointing in my direction. It took me a while before I realised it was the sound of a screaming porn actress. We were all alone and I started to panic and walk faster to get away from him. I imagined that he could just drag me into one of the Byzantine churches and do whatever he wanted to me, but then I thought that he could have done that anyway, since we were two lone women in the car with him in the middle of the dessert. I rushed out of the site strongly controlling myself not to swear at him since I wasn’t sure what we were going to do if he decided to leave us there. We got back into the car and continued driving. His stares and winks got even more intense as we drove towards Qa’alat Jabar, where he again stalked me and attempted to take photos of me while my mum stayed behind. The highlight of our trip came as we sat into the car to cover the last bit of the road. He started playing porn clips on his mobile, which he put on the dashboard above his stirring wheel so that I could see it directly. He continued to stare and wink at me. Finally, I covered my head with a scarf (No wonder women in Syria have to do that. Bad joke, I know.) and stared through the window for the rest of the trip, praying to God to make it to Allepo. And we finally did and Ahmad was gone, to my big relief.

After this experience, arranging a ride from Allepo to Beirut was a rather stressful process. And we finally got lucky, or so we thought for the first part of the day. We met a great guy working at the hotel who came with us and his friend, a taxi driver, to visit all the places around Allepo before we crossed the border into Lebanon. We visited Sergila, one of the dead cities, Hama and Qa’alat al Hosn, i.e. Crack de Chevalliers, a fantastic crusaders’ castle that nobody visiting Syria should miss. The guys were funny, they spoke English and they were thoroughly shocked by our story of Ahmad. They even went as far as saying that he would have been killed if he did that to a Syrian woman (by her family, of course :P). The deal was that they get us to the border where another Syrian would take us over and drive us into Beirut. They paid the guy and told us not to pay him anything else. The guy was chubby, old and smelly and drove a fake Mercedes Benz called C20 like a complete lunatic, speeding way over any speed limits. He bullied us through the border, which was even more ridiculous in terms of paper work than the Jordan-Syria one. In the meantime, he frantically went around looking for more people to take with us and make more money. He found nobody but gave a lift to a decent looking Lebanese soldier who spoke French so our ride became a bit more comfortable since we could communicate. However, the soldier got off before us and as we got to the hotel, the driver made a huge scene that we had to give him money and that our ride was not paid for. In the end he insisted that he wanted only 20 dollars for the border crossing, because “he had to bribe officials” (hotel staff was translating for us, so we followed the discussion). By then we badly needed to get rid of anything that had to do with Syria, so we gave him the 20 dollars to leave us alone. We got into our hotel room and washed off and scrubbed the feeling of frustration and unease for hours into the night. I don’t think I was ever so relieved to leave a country in my whole life.