hama, apamea, dead cities (syria)

From Palmyra we took a bus to Hama in the late evening and spent 2 days & nights there, visiting nearby historical sites.

View from the hotel room at Riad Hotel, located right next to the clock-tower in Hama.
The first day we took a trip to Apamea and two Dead Cities.

a mosaic museum housed in a 16th-century Turkish caravanserai in/near Apamea

the mosaics were beautiful, but in quite a sorry state.
In fact, while we were standing at one of the mosaics, this guy came up and took a mop lying in a bucket of water nearby and mopped the mosaic to rid the layer of dust settled on it! Some where beautiful ones were just stacked against the wall in the dark unpaved corners of the serai.

(we missed the main mosaic museum - Ma'arret Al Nouman - because it had closed by the time we got there in the evening, but looked like the mosaics were well-kept there)

It was a foggy morning and the fog didn't really lift while we were at Apamea
(an ancient city from the 3rd century BC).
Even the ticket booth looked beautiful in the fog.

I'm afraid I don't have much more to say about Apamea because
(i) I was less interested in the history than in the feel of the place, and
(ii) because it is 2:25 AM just now and I am too tired to google Apamea and find out more. In any case, now I am a little less interested in the historical sites I saw in Syria and more interested in contemporay Syrian politics - just read an interesting book last month called "Syria: Neither Bread Nor Freedom" - a history of its repressive state regime (esp. the police state under the previous president Hafeez al-Assad, but also the promises of more freedom that came when his son Basher al-Assad took over in 2000, most of which have remained unfulfilled) and its civil society movement. I knew very little of this history and politics during my travels in Syria, and now it seems strange to imagine the political realities I read about and I wonder how they affect the lives of the ordinary Syrians we had our little chats with.

Finally, a token photograph from Serjilla, one of the two "Dead Cities" we visited (below)

As far as I was concerned, the Dead Cities might have lent themselves to more interesting photos had the light been interesting that day. Anyhow, the history of these cities is quite fascinating - these are ruins of Byzantine cities that were abandoned for reasons not entirely known. Here is a really interesting article in The Guardian about them.

The second day Varun went to Krak des Chevaliers, a crusader castle, while I stayed in the hotel and worked on the edited book I'm doing with Romi! I did manage to step out to pick up a good lunch but unfortunately wasn't in the mood of carrying my camera so don't have anything of modern Hama (except the photo from the hotel room). Oh, and we had a fantastic dinner at (ok have to remember the name of the place) which goes down as one of the best dinners I had in Syria.

Next stop: Aleppo

The office of Al Kadmous (a private bus co.) at the Hama bus station, where we got into a chat with the guy who sold us our bus tickets (he wanted to know the size of India's population, among other things. And he also told us that he didn't like people from Aleppo - for the life of me I can't remember what reason he gave us, but he was very vehement about it - will have to ask V)