All posts tagged syria

Syria – Bosra and Daraa

Bosra was my very last destination in Syria. It is an ancient Roman city located in the southernmost region of Syria near the Jordan border. It was only about an hour and a half from Damascus. The ancient Citadel below: Kids playing soccer: When I left Bosra, it was evening and getting dark. The buses […]

Syria – Mar Musa Monastery

Mar Musa was among the last place I went during my Syrian trip. This was back in June 2011. Mar Musa is an ancient Christian monastery located about an hour north of Damascus. It is one of the few surviving monasteries in the Middle East and dates from the 11th century. The monastery is perched […]

Syria – Damascus

Damascus is the heart of Syria. It is a city of almost two million. I spent a considerable amount of time here. Like many big cities in developing countries, a good bit of it is noisy, crowded, and polluted. I’m not a big fan of large cities in the poorer parts of the world, but […]

Syria – Hama

(Continued from “My Journey Through Syria in 2011 – Aleppo“) I spent a few nights in Hama, arriving from Damascus by bus. Again the time period was May of 2011. I intended to stop here to take a day trip to the well-known Crac des Chevaliers castle just west of Hama. At the hotel there […]

Palmyra Syria in 2011

Palmyra has (had) among the world’s greatest ruins of the Roman Empire. I stayed in Palmyra for three nights. This was in mid-May of 2011. I arrived from Hama. During my entire stay, I saw just one other foreign tourist, who was from Germany. I basically had Palmyra for myself. There was a lot of […]

Syria – The Dead Cities

I took a day trip to the “Dead Cities” just outside of Aleppo. I had wanted to go to the Dead Cities, but it would have been expensive for me to go alone with a tour guide. In Aleppo I met a couple from Seattle when I was at the Citadel. We chatted and got […]

Aleppo

I did a big Middle East tour back in the spring of 2011. I was traveling solo. This was near the beginning of the Mideast uprising. The reason I went was to see some of the historic sites before it was no longer possible to do so. It was timely because Syria was being devastated […]