When I picked up my car from Hertz at the Chahba Cham Hotel, I drove away alert but full of confidence. My confidence evaporated at the first traffic circle. I wanted the road toward Damascus, but the signs were only in Arabic. I can decode Arabic, but I can't exactly read it. I spotted a word that began with the letter ``dal" and followed that arrow. At the second traffic circle, I was able to read as far as the letter ``mim". By the third traffic circle, I could read the whole name ``Dimashq".
That didn't get me onto the highway, however. A road construction zone intervened. A detour sign told me to turn right and then abandoned me. Some false turns took me to an assemblage of cement mixers. Questions resulted in random answers. But I drove toward where I thought the road should be, and eventually there it was.
In the eastern desert finding the way was easy. There was only one road, and the only traffic was a convoy of twenty oil trucks coming from the direction of Iraq. In the densely populated Euphrates Valley, it was easier to get impatient, weaving my way among oblivious pedestrians on the road, but finding my way wasn't markedly more difficult.
In western Syria the Anti-Lebanon Mountains run from the northwest corner of the Mediterranean down to the Lebanon border and beyond, and there the roads twist and turn and split and merge, and villages proliferate. My map was not good. Towns that were small dots on the map were big on the ground, and roads that looked alone on the map were indistinguishable on the ground from unmarked roads branching to completely wrong places.
The technique I developed was to drive for a while and then stop and ask someone where the next town I saw on my map was. I wouldn't understand the answer, but at least I could go the way they pointed.
More than once, they were going the way I was, and they simply got in my car and directed me. The town of Idlib, south of San Simeon, was big and full of right turns. When I had lost all confidence and sense of direction, I asked a man standing at a corner where the next town of Ariha was. Without a word, he opened the door of my car, and as I hurriedly cleared my maps and camera off the passenger seat, he sat down. He directed me to Ariha, and one town beyond on the way I was trying to go. When he got out, he finally said something. He offered me tea. But I had miles to go before I ran out of sunlight.
At Qala'at Salah ad-Din, a Crusader-Era castle named after the Kurdish commander who crushed the Crusaders, the man in the ticket booth told me that all sites in Syria closed at 4 p.m. ``Including Ugarit?" I asked. Yes. It was 3:08, and 35 kilometers to Latakia, beyond which Ugarit lay. I drove the road like a mad man, slicing curves, burning the brakes, running the gears up to 4000 rpm, passing trucks on curves, slowing only for children by the side of the road. Fortunately there were few slow trucks and few children, and I made it to Latakia by 3:50. But I was furious with myself as I did this--I was rushing blindly through some of the most beautiful hilly forested country I had encountered in Syria.
I asked directions in Latakia, and again the man got into my car. He directed me several miles up the road, I suspect a little out of my way, and then pointed me in the right direction. I got to Ugarit at 4:04, and discovered they were open till 5.
When I left Krak des Chevaliers, I drove down to the village at its base and asked a group of young men where the road to Masyaf was--the next big town that showed on my map. They pointed one way, but the way they answered made me suspicious, and when I got around the corner, I asked a middle-aged man, and he pointed the other way. He was right. I continued to ask questions at every fork in the road and every corner, and for one 5-kilometer stretch gave a soldier a ride. A turn inside Masyaf could have thrown me off my route, so I plunged straight through, even when for two blocks I had to creep through a crowded market.
Someone from the rental car company picked me up at my hotel in Amman and drove me to their office in the Wadi Abdun district. It was raining hard, the first rain of winter, and as in California, the rain lifted half a year's worth of oil from the road and turned the road into soap. Only more than in California, since Jordanian vehicles drop more oil all year.
I drove south from Amman on the Desert Highway and past the airport. The road was slick. I saw two accidents. In the first a small pickup had run into and killed two camels and smashed in his own front end. In the other a bus had spun out of control and was blocking two lanes of traffic, forcing a detour through the back streets of a village.
By the time I was fifty kilometers south of Amman, the traffic and the rain had both let up, and the road was fine. The road went through flat rock and sand desert, with an occasional mining complex off the road. Driving was easy after that, until
There are three north-south roads in Jordan--the Desert Highway that I was on, flat and straight; the King's Highway that twists through the mountains, and a road that follows the shore of the Dead Sea and skirts the border with Israeli Negev. My plan was to drive south on the Desert Highway, cut west on a connector road to the town of Ash-Shawbak on the King's Highway and follow that south to Petra. Before I got to the connector road, I spotted a sign that said ``Detour to Ash-Shawbak". I took it. Shortly before I thought I should reach the King's Highway there was a fork in the road. I followed the sign to Ash-Shawbak, and after that I have no idea where I went. Soon I encountered signs to Petra, and then other signs that said Detour to Petra. There was such a sign at almost every junction, and I always obeyed. But what should have been a half hour drive took two and a half hours, over barren hills and through small villages where when I asked which way to Petra, the children lied and the adults pointed in some random direction and acted as though it were far far away. I turned so many corners that I can't figure out how I didn't tie a knot in myself.
But eventually I descended from the town of Wadi Musa to the entrance to Petra, in midafternoon with time before sunset for a reconnaissance mission through the main part of the site.
When I left the Dead Sea resort of Suwayma, Jordan, I looked for gas, but Suwayma was just a depressed little town strung along a frontage road by the highway. I asked a policeman setting up a speed trap where the nearest benzene was. He said twenty kilometers north or ten kilometers south. Fortunately I was going south along the coast of the Dead Sea. But ten kilometers later there was nothing. Twenty kilometers after that in Ghor Mazra`a I asked an auto mechanic at his garage. He said there was one twenty kilometers south in Safi or one twenty kilometers uphill to the east in Karak. Seeing my gas gauge redlining, he recommended Safi. But I was going to Karak, so I risked it, ignoring my gas gauge, but focusing on my odometer. Three kilometers before Karak I saw the gas station. I had been given the car empty, and I hoped to return it empty, so I got just 5 Jordanian dinars worth, about $7.50.
I stopped to look at the town's Crusader castle, and then I followed signs for Amman out of Karak, thinking it would take me north on the King's Highway, whose mountainous terrain I wanted to see. As I drove along, it began to look more and more like the Desert Highway terrain. Then I reached the interchange with the Desert Highway. I had taken the wrong turn out of Karak and had driven the last 33 kilometers east on a connector road. One hour and, though I didn't think about it till later, crucial gas lost.
I drove back to Karak and made the right turn this time. I drove north on the King's Highway past fields and villages and knobby hills, and across the broad canyon of Wadi Mujib. In the town of Mulayh I glanced at the gas gauge and saw it was nearly empty again. I asked and learned there was a gas station two kilometers back. I drove two kilometers back and asked again and was told it was two more kilometers back. I was relieved when I finally saw it, but then was told they only sold natural gas, which many of the vehicles in Jordan run on. I could drive 10 kilometers back or 24 kilometers ahead to my day's destination of Madaba. Against the man's advice I drove on to Madaba, kicking myself for allowing not one but two gas scares in one day. I made it, bought 5 Jordanian dinars more of benzene, and arrived at St. George's Church and the mosaic map just before they closed.