St. Simeons, Syria

Adam, our tour manager/driver is a really interesting fellow. He's been doing overland trips for ten years now, and this is actually his last tour. Nobody has died on any of his tour so far, so I feel like I'm in good hands. (Apparently deaths on overland tours are not so uncommon--especially in Africa. If you die there, they have to carry your body out--on the roof of the truck.) He said this trip was pretty routine, and we were on good roads for the majority of the time. The way he said this made it clear he burned with nostalgia for the era when rutted mud holes passed as "dirt roads".

So I woke up at the ungodly hour of six and hopped in the truck to start my tour. (If you are very interested in the transport I am using, you can find out more about it here.) Our first day of travel was pretty crazy:

I've already mentioned that the ride was pretty bumpy. I was jostled around so much, I had to pee every twenty minutes. That's not a happy thing when you are in the land of BYOTP squat toilets.

About two hours into our drive there was a huge bang followed by lots of clunk-clunk-clunking. It sounded as if we had run over a refrigerator, or maybe a baby elephant. Fortunately no baby elephants were harmed, and it was only a blowout. While girls worked on making fake student IDs, the boys changed the tire. (Personally, I would have preferred to change the tire as it seemed the more interesting and less tedious occupation.) In an hour or so, we were back on the road, but not for long. As we were driving up a hill, our truck crapped out. After two hours of head scratching and tinkering, Adam discovered we were out of gas. Of course we all roared with laughter over that one.

Fortunately we made it to the border by eight. Unfortunately, there was a holdup due to a visa processing issue, but no worries. We broke out the stove in the no-man's land between the Turkish/Syrian border and cooked dinner. And then we waited. And then we waited some more. Finally, one of the (blonde) girls from our tour went in and flirted a little with the border guards. Magically, our problems were resolved and we were on the road within twenty minutes.

We arrived at the ruins of St. Simeon's cathedral at midnight. Adam (our tour manager/driver) woke up the caretaker at the ruin to see if we could park our truck there. Although he was roused from bed, the caretaker was very obliging and even offered to give us a midnight tour, which was quite fantastic.

The church was built in 473 AD for Simeon, the first column-sitter. He was mostly a loony-loo whose claim to fame was chaining himself to a tall pillar for the better part of thirty years, where answered questions from pilgrims and spread seeds of misogyny. The stone he sat on didn't look too comfortable, and I bet his bum hurt from sitting on it for so long.

We were supposed to sleep in the parking lot, but the caretaker allowed us to sleep in the ruins of the church. And so I slept under the blackened sky, littered by thousands of stars and framed by ancient arches. A few bats circled overhead, keeping the mosquitoes away from us. It was an impossibly perfect night.