Day five(Saturday): Sanliurfa - Gaziantep - Kilis - Aleppo - Damascus

The title of this post should give you a good idea of the chaotic events of the day. After writing the post before last at the Internet Café “Interaktif” in Urfa, I checked out of the hotel, had a chat with Yusuf whom I bumped into on a street corner, and headed for the otogar, a sprawling and loud place just outside the city.

Completely soaked because of the heat, I got a ticket for the next bus to Gaziantep and boarded the bus. When I took out my phone to write a text message, the conductors told me to switch it off because using mobiles was prohibited in the bus. This sort of irritated me, but what could I do, especially as one of the conductors sat next to me the whole trip. The ride to Gaziantep took two and a half hours. On the way, we crossed the Euphrates again at a town called Birecik, where I was impressed to see a family saying goodbye to a boy who was boarding the bus. Tearful farewells always make an impression on me, and probably understandably so. I took this picture, but I’m glad they didn’t see me taking it.

Heartbreaking farewell at Birecik.

Gaziantep’s otogar was easier to manage than the one in Urfa, but asking around all the companies for buses to the Syrian border proved to be futile – all I got as a response were shaking heads, suspicious frowns and endless ramblings in Turkish. Exasperated because I didn’t want to get stuck in this big hectic city, I tried asking people outside the otogar, but they hardly knew what I was talking about, either. So much for it being very easy to catch the microbus to Kilis at the border from the main otogar: I gradually was able to understand that there was another depot, the “Kilis garage” - somebody shoved me inside a city dolmus (minibus) and I was on my way downtown. I kept asking the driver whether we were going to the Kilis garage but after the tenth time he got fed up and probably told me to shut up in Turkish. At the bus stops, somebody yelled the destination of the bus to people waiting straight into my ear and I had felt a real urge to curse at him in Finnish. I was dropped off at a street corner and pointed in the right direction.

Fingers crossed, I walked along the street and arrived to a petrol station – needless to say, nobody there spoke English either, but at the word “Kilis” I finally got some life into the vendors and they pointed at some vague direction. I arrived at a dusty parking lot full of minibuses on their way to towns in the region. I found one with a sign saying Kilis, but it was packed and left without me. I went inside an office and asked about buying a ticket, but the man at the counter just lit a cigarette and ignored me.


A box of tissues goes a long way...
The driver of the next minibus was so out of it I had to take out a pen and draw an approximate map of the region on a box of tissues (see above) for him to understand where I was going. The price sounded like a rip-off to me, but at this point I hardly cared anymore. At least I knew I was going in the right direction now, and I packed with all the other passengers into the minibus. The drive to Kilis took less than an hour. Looking at the my fellow passengers, I guessed that almost all of them were headed for the border, but I was wrong – the only one left on the minibus after we stopped in Kilis was me, so the driver had all the time in the world to visit some of his friends before we continued.

The only good thing about the driver was that he helped me change my Turkish money back into Syrian lira – and it’s good I did this because I didn’t have any of those left. It probably goes without saying this meant another visit to a friend who changed the money for me. I expected to arrive at a busy border post where I could just walk across and catch a bus to Aleppo on the other side.

Instead, I was half-dumped at a completely remote barbed wire fence with the road going through it and a dead-looking hut with two bored soldiers whiling away their time in front of it, clicking away at their prayer beads (something every man I saw in Turkey had). It didn’t exactly inspire confidence, but I walked up to them with my passport, was greeted with about twenty questions in Turkish, and signaled to put down my bag, sit down and wait. I couldn’t see anything on the road ahead, so it seemed like walking to Syria wasn’t an option.

Eyes glued to my watch, I waited for a car to pass by and give me a ride, but the few cars passing here were coming from the Syrian side. Finally a Turkish taxi arrived and took a man from Istanbul and me to the Syrian border post. Once we were there, I was so happy I could finally communicate with somebody! Compared to my Turkish skills, one could say I am almost fluent in Arabic, and because I was able to answer the officers’ questions in Arabic, they treated me so much better than the Turks! While the Turks were having their passports scrutinised, I was being offered coffee. The driver was getting really irritated, especially when the officers asked him how much he was charging me for the ride and they told me to only pay him half of that before stamping his passport!

Finally, light at the end of the tunnel

We crossed the border, and really Syria felt like safe territory for the moment and I could finally relax for a while. Not too much, though, because the driver was listening to some religious recording (probably something like: “The Call of the Imam – Best hits”) at full volume the whole trip to Aleppo. I was planning to go straight to the airport and see if I could catch the last flight to Damascus. I switched to an Aleppo taxi on the outskirts of the city, and at 19:45 I got a text message from my aunt saying the last plane left around eight o’clock, so I told the driver to floor it! Well, I hardly know how to say that in Arabic, but he got the message from my frantic gesticulations.

Already resigned to the fact I was probably going to have to spend the night at ALP airport, I arrived at check-in to realise that the airplane was an hour late! Now that’s what I call good luck! Someone once told me that the last minutes are always the longest ones and I really felt it when I was stuck in the check-in queue behind a huge clueless family with a hundred bags. The bored clerks asked me where I came from and why I was in Syria, and when I told them half of the family history they laughed, maybe because they didn’t believe it. To put it mildly, I wasn’t in the mood for jokes so I tried to ignore them while my boarding pass was being issued. When we landed at Damascus airport (the plane was coming from Frankfurt, so obviously everyone burst into applause at touchdown), I was the first at passport control and through in two seconds. Home just in time to catch the end of the match between Mexico and Argentina.