Getting from Damascus to Mar Musa (Christmas trip 2010 - part 1)
I’m starting to understand why Syrian guidebooks etc. never really tell you exactly the right way to go or how much things actually cost or where things are located. It’s because once you’ve waded through the uncertainty and figured things out for yourself, you want to protect the knowledge — you earned it, so enjoy, and let the others try their best. Or perhaps more likely, it’s because there isn’t exactly one correct way to go, things don’t necessarily cost the same for different people at different times, locations of things might change, etc. Syria is an inexactly country, and Syrians know it. They’re also aware of the strong likelihood that foreigners / tourists are not mentally prepared for their country’s inexactness, and, perhaps as a kind of compensation, Syrians often go out of their way to make you, as a foreigner, feel comfortable. This is a very good thing, although I’ve written before about how Syrian hospitality can sometimes be overwhelming.
On the road to Mar Musa
Finding our way…
A young girl ran to catch up with Jennifer and me as we trekked the 1.5 miles from the highway where the bus from Damascus had dropped us off. We were hiking this last bit to the small town of Nabk where we hoped to find some sort of transportation to the old Christian monastery of Mar Musa. The girl was one of a pack of 8 kids we had passed a couple minutes before. As we passed, they had laughed and yelled and said “hello” in English. A couple boys, perhaps in training for adulthood, simply stood and stared at us with with the typical Syrian man “zombie gaze” that we’ve become accustomed to. We smiled at the kids and continued walking past, but the one young girl — she couldn’t have been older than 8 — separated from the pack and ran to catch up until was walking in stride with us. “Hello,” she said in Arabic, “where are you from?”
The entire conversation from this point was in Arabic, and, much to our delight, mutually comprehensible. She asked where we were going (and why not drive?). She asked if Jennifer and I were married; we said we were as that’s sometimes the easier option. Eager to practice my vocabulary, I asked the girl if she was married too. This resulted in a little sheepish grin that grew into laughter as she said, “La!” (No) The three of us said a few more things to each other before she offered us a handful of the sunflower seeds she was carrying. This was not the first, nor the last time a child would offer us sunflower seeds. We graciously accepted and Jennifer asked the girl, “Bikam?” (How much?) Again we got the cutest little grin from the girl, but this time her expression was less of surprise than of “come on, you should know better than to ask me that — please just take!” So we did, said goodbye, and continued on.
As I wrote above, the two of us were walking toward the town of Nabk, where we hoped to find a bus or taxi to the monastery of Mar Musa. Less than 5 minutes down the road, before we reached what looked like the town’s entrance, a car pulled up next to us. The driver said something very quickly which neither of us understood, but he was clearly gesturing for us to get into his car. Was this the taxi we were hoping for?? That car wasn’t marked as a taxi and there was a second man already in the front passenger seat, but when I asked the two men if this was a taxi, the driver replied in the affirmative. We asked if a ride to Mar Musa was possible (“hal mumkin nadhhab ila Mar Musa?”); the man said yes. We asked how much; he fetched a wad of cash from his pants pocket, fumbled around with it and held up 250 SYP.
Jennifer and I consulted each other. The Lonely Planet travel guide had said a car to Mar Musa would cost about 300 SYP but it hadn’t specified exactly where to get a car or whether it’d be marked a taxi etc. — it just said, in the typically vague Lonely Planet fashion,
Once in Nabek, you should be able to negotiate a driver for the 17.5 km ride to Mar Musa. You have a good chance of getting a ride in.
Great, thanks for that. Basically this meant hitch-hike and hope for the best. Well, we figured, we’d gotten this far on our instincts and the stranger in the car seemed nice enough. The other guy also gestured and encouraged us to get into the car. “Okay,” I said in Arabic, “Let’s go.”
Where is he taking us?
We quickly found out that the driver of this car, like the 8 year old girl, spoke not a word of English. The difference was he spoke faster and with longer words and more complex sentences. We didn’t really know what was going on, but we were in this man’s car now and heading to Mar Musa — or so we thought…
We drove into the town of Nabk and started winding through what looked like a residential area. This was clearly not the mountain highway through vast, barren desert plains that we’d been expecting. We continued deeper into the winding streets of the city. We made so many turns that even with my trusty compass there was no way I could have led ourselves back out of town to the main road, as I had no map and had lost all sense of direction. All of a sudden, we pulled over — the man in the front passenger seat pulled some money from his pocket, handed it to driver, and exited the car. Maybe this guy was a taxi after all!
We proceeded to drive the narrow streets for some more minutes and eventually turned into some kind of compound. The buildings looked to be partly residential, partly unfinished. The driver pulled over in front of a small house, turned off the car, exited and headed toward the house door. Okay…
Turns out the man was picking up an elderly lady, which I can only presume was prearranged. As the four of us drove to another area of Nabk, the driver and elderly lady spoke to each other and to us, though we didn’t understand much of anything. They both laughed when I revealed I was American — and the lady was clearly very pleased! She remarked in Arabic that America is a very big country and very pretty. I replied “Thank you” and wanted to say something insightful or interesting about Syria. With my limited vocabulary the best I could say was, “America is pretty. Also, Syria is pretty.” She and the driver nodded and agreed in unison. After some more minutes we pulled over again and let the lady off, not before she offered Jennifer and me a couple apples from her bag! We tried saying “no, thank you” — the lady was clearly very poor — but she insisted, so we accepted. She also gave the driver an apple along with some cash for the ride.
View from the stairs looking back down the canyon
“Yalla, ila Mar Musa!”
The driver evidently finished his other taxi fares and it was now time for us. We snaked through a bit more of Nabk until…. now we’re on a desolate, arid highway headed into the middle of nowhere. Jennifer and I grinned to each other: we were on the right track. On the way we hardly spoke another word. The landscape was like nothing either of us had ever seen. The driver broke the silence to ask if we were sleeping at Mar Musa, as many travelers do (rooms and meals are free, though you’re expected to contribute to the running of the monastery — that is, by doing dishes, keeping common areas tidy, helping with dinner, making tea, etc.). We had not intended on staying the night but only for a couple hours, so we managed to agree with the driver to meet us later to drive us back to Nabk. I gave him 300 SYP, 50 more than he’d asked for, and we said goodbye to each other.
The sun was starting to set so we strapped on our packs and started the mile-long hike up the steep stairs carved into the side of the mountain, leading up to an all-stone-and-wood compound looking thing at the top. What immediately struck us was the sheer silence — no cars, no people, indeed no weather. It was utterly still. Difficult to capture on our cameras, but we tried. Water break about two-thirds of the way up, before the stairs got extremely steep. At the top we were met by a very nice man speaking English with a Scandinavian accent. He welcomed us to the site, disappointed we weren’t going to stay the night. He gave us a quick tour of the living quarters — men slept on one level, women on the other — before pointing us toward another complex of buildings containing the church, kitchen, laundry and eating areas, and other common spaces.
We looked over the gorge. Incredible. The night was now fully upon us but the moon provided more than enough light to see all the way down the canyon. Did we just climb that?
Another man showed us into the church, an ancient church some 1000 years old with frescoes painted on all the walls. Three layers of frescoes, in fact, dating from the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries, surrounded us on all sides. The floors and shelves were “littered” with holy texts, hymnals, candles and religious icons. The shiny icons, frescoed walls and multicolored carpets covering the floor was quite a sight. You never would have guessed all this vibrancy was housed within a crumbling sandstone block of a structure.
We drank some tea with a German couple — probably in their 60s — who were staying then night, then bid our farewell and started the hike back down the mountain. The time we might have saved in walking downhill was offset by the darkness of night, although the moonlight did just as much to help us along as my basic flashlight’s humble beam. We were met at the base of the stairs by the driver from before — yes! He came back for us! On the drive back into Nabk we explained to the driver that we were next heading to the city of Hama. We aimed to get there that night, hopefully before midnight. He apparently understood and said many things to us, of which we probably understood only about half, but at this point he has gained our complete trust so we went with the flow. He dropped us off at a kind of intersection where many buses, vans and cargo trucks were passing through. He stopped the car and helped flag down the correct bus for us… and away we went to Hama!
