Travel With Bob and Mary: Damascus Syria

We had several emails from family and friends telling us that the State Department was warning Americans to leave Syria immediately. We had booked a tour with Overseas Adventure Travel (OAT) for a pre-trip to Syria before our trip to Turkey, and they had not cancelled the trip so off we went to Syria. We arrived in Syria several days before our tour was to begin and had arranged, via email, with the Syrian OAT tour guide to have him show us around Damascus before the others in the group arrived.

Our guide took us to a Shia mosque because he would be taking us, on the regular tour, to a famous Sunni mosque. Syria is mostly Sunni & Iran is Shia. I went in the men’s entrance and Mary the women’s entrance. Mary was given a chador (black cloak) to cover herself. We met in the courtyard. I went to the men’s section of the mosque where the men pray which is very large with lots of space and Mary went into the women’s section which is small, crowded and a sea of black dressed women. She found it difficult to move through the space, no one giving space to another. There was, to a westerner’s eye, a feeling of rudeness, some pushing shoving and unwillingness to let any one pass or move in the room. Many were trying to get close to the burial vault of one of Mohammed’s descendants where they would pray. Mary said she felt it would be easy to offend them and was not sure she would be safe if she did. (She was the only white, foreigner in the room) While attempting to leave the crowded room, a woman at the doorway, who seemed to have some power, chastised her because her black cloak was not covering her neck. Mary said there was no warmth or kindness in the woman’s censure and she could not get out of there soon enough. She did not have the same experience in Iran.

We had a good tour of old town Damascus with a fantastic lunch in a local restaurant. The next day we thought we would just rest for a day before our Syria tour started. We spent the day lounging around the hotel which was one of the best hotel we have experienced. I sat in the courtyard with the computer and in 4 hours time they had brought me tea 3 times, once with cookies and cake! But at 6 PM we learned the Syrian tour was cancel due to the unrest in Syria and we would be getting up at 2 AM to catch a 5 AM flight out of Syria.

At dinner the tour representatives were making plans on how to fill our time vacated by the Syrian trip. Since we were going to Turkey on our regular tour they were trying to contact the Turkey tour guide to set up a trip to southeastern Turkey. Within hours they had set up a tour guide, a hotel in Istanbul, a flight from Istanbul to southeastern Turkey, and hotels in southeastern Turkey to fill our time.