arida border post

I will leave it to Ethan to provide a detailed description of yesterday’s failure to make it to Syria. In case you hate following links, we took a bus headed to Aleppo, but at the border were told that there is a “new order” and we now needed permission from Damascus to get a visa at the border. They would “telegraph” them (I’m pretty sure “fax” was the intended word) and we could wait. And wait we did.

The bus left, and we spent the next 10 hours sitting in the dirty lobby. We played cards, we went over some wedding stuff, we stared into space. Many of the soldiers/border guards felt sorry for us and brought us coffee, tea, nuts, oranges, a banana. They tried advocating for us to the guy in charge.

Finally, it was midnight, and we couldn’t imagine sleeping on a bench in the freezing lobby. I had read some online accounts about people waiting for permission for a visa at the border with Turkey for 24 hours. Lebanon has had a different relationship with Syria, and for years it has been easy for foreigners to get a visa at the border (I have done this 5 times without difficulty). This “new order” is presumably because of the changing relationship between Lebanon and Syria, supposedly we were the first to be affected by it at the relatively quiet Arida border crossing.

We had an irritating interaction with the guy in charge (who happened to be the only person there who spoke English), got our passports, and walked back to the Lebanese border post. We got 2 week visas easily (they didn’t notice or care that we had not really left the country, as we were supposed to have done in order to get new Lebanese visas). After a mere 2.5 hour wait (and offers of coffee and apples), a bus finally came along and we were off. We made it home at 6 AM and fell into bed.

In the photo, it is difficult to see, but there is a poster in the background that I find particularly humorous. There is a crowd of people gazing lovingly up at the image of Hafez Assad (the former head of Syria, who died in 2000. He is the father of Bashar Assad, the current leader) with a Syrian flag waving in the background.

The biggest drag about the whole thing is that we didn’t get to go to Aleppo (and Ethan has never been) and we didn’t get to stay at Beit Wakil, a place I have been dreaming about since I saw it in September. Carrie and I had made the acquaintance of the owner, Habib, who had insisted on us drinking a glass of whiskey with him.
Beit Wakil is actually 2 adjoined Ottoman houses which have been beautifully restored. One side is a courtyard restaurant, considered one of the best restaurants in Syria, and the other is a hotel with the rooms arranged around the other courtyard. Habib had lived up to his promise of a special rate, and we were even getting a suite, since it was the last room available. Hopefully, we will manage to return in January or February- we will see.