The Dervish Hordes of Omdurman

The drums beat louder and louder, the intoxicating rhythmn quickening. The setting sun casts a golden light across the scene, and the unmistakable aroma of marijuana drifts through the dusk air. A brightly-dressed man in yellow robes marches gaily around the edge of the circle wafting clouds of incense from a brazier swinging aily by his side. Hundreds of voices cry out in unison, singing the first line of the shahada, the Muslim declaration of faith, "la illaha ila-llah, la illaha ila-llah, la illaha ila-llah, la illaha ila-llah". There is no god but Allah, there is no god but Allah. Everyone dances wildly, limbs flailing, heads thrown back, dreadlocks swinging. The chanting continues incessantly, "la illaha ila-llah, la illaha ila-llah". Even my feet are twitching now, as everyone in the crowd begins to sway in time to the music. A man breaks out of the circle and dances into the centre. Suddenly he is up on one leg, spinning manically, all the while chanting. "la illaha ila-llah, la illaha ila-llah". All around me, other dervishes break out of the circle and begin to spin around, chanting, always chanting, lost on their personal path to God.

This is about as far away from most people's image of Islam as it's possible to get, more Woodstock than Wahabi, in many ways closer to an ecstasy-fuelled Shoreditch rave than a veneration of Allah in one of the world's most strictly Muslim countries. Yet Islam it is, and hardly could there be a better example of Sudan's perplexingly contradictory attitude to religion than the Whirling Dervishes.

As has become well-known in the West, and particularly in the UK, in the last few days, Sudan is officially an Islamic republic, with Islamic Sharia - "street" - Law in operation, at least in the Arab north of the country. Indeed, prior to his now infamous sojurn in Taliban-controlled Afganistan, a certain well-known Saudi construction magnate and outspoken religious cleric spent five years resident in Sudan in the mid-1990s, departing only after intense American pressure forced the Khartoum government to expel him. From what I can discern, Sheikh bin Laden is a hero to the majority of Sudanese, as much for his unpublicised (in the West) philanthropy as his better known slaying of infidels. Most of the tarmac highways in Sudan (of which there are not many) were financed and built by Osama and his construction firm, as was the Port Sudan International Airport.

Yet perversely, bin Laden's strict Saudi Wahabi interpretation of Islam would be anathema to the Sudanese, who tend towards the much more laidback, mystical, Sufi strain of the religion, and incorporate many traditional tribal beliefs and practises into their faith. Such "un-Islamic" ideas as witchdoctors, exorcisms, and saints are apparently common in Sudanese Islam, while women openly converse or shake hands with unknown men (including strange white men with backpacks) without apparent fear of reprisal. Amazingly many Sudanese love having their picture taken, and unsolicited offers of pictures to unwary travellers are common. Local children in particular are often openly enraged at polite refusals - unable to believe that a khawaja (an affectionate term roughly equivalent to the Spanish "gringo" or the Thai "farang") could possibly ever venture outside without a camera. Most perversely of all, at least in the eyes of orthodox Islam, the Sudanese are apparently rather partial to alcohol, and despite the strict ban on the importation and sale of booze, homemade moonshine is apparently a big hit with locals, particularly in rural areas. (Suffice to say I have not tried it myself - a Spanish traveller I met who had, assured me that he was lucky to escape with his life. He was talking about the hangover, but the consequences of being caught don't really bare thinking about. Being arrested once in Sudan was careless, twice would surely be foolish.)

But as the unfortunate Gillian Gibbons and her teddy bear "Mo Mo" have found out this week, despite all the eccentricities of Sudanese Islam, it is after all a very important part of life here. Perhaps more so than any other Muslim country I have visited, Islam is a very public facet of Sudanese society. Walk along any street or sit in any hotel at one of the five allotted prayer times each day and there are countless hundreds of Sudanese, uniformly clad in their mostly immaculate white robes and skullcaps, kneeling on a mat or carpet in supplication to Allah, quietly muttering the shahada to themselves. This can pose a few logistical problems for the unbeliever, as it is supposedly considered very bad form to walk in front of a praying Muslim. No problem when said devotee is kneeling on the pavement of a wide street, but it is a different story when he is blocking the door of your hotel room, from which you need to exit at some speed in order to reach the bathroom down the corridor to deal with what you fear may in fact be a new and virulent strain of cholera. Allah apparently took pity on my pathetic state and has, as yet, neglected to smite me for the rather ungainly manner in which I hurdled two of his faithful on my way to the disgusting hole in the ground which doubles for a bathroom in the "Namarg" Hotel in Wad Medani earlier this week. Happily his mercy has also extended to granting me a reprieve from the more unpleasant symptoms of my mysterious stomach ailment. Allahu Akbar!

As I watched the dervishes twirling and whirling, my thoughts drifted back through time, and came to rest in roughly the same location a century or so earlier, with the brave men of the British Army who faced down a force of some forty thousand "dervish" devotees of the Sudanese Caliphate at the infamous Battle of Omdurman in 1898. Despite their vastly superior numbers, and their absolutely fervent belief in the power of Allah to bring victory, the dervish army were massacred in their thousands by the well-trained and crucially well-equipped forces. The Sudanese were a formidable foe: 15 years previously their fearless infantry charges had defeated the British and allowed the Mahdi - the self-appointed Islamic Messiah - to expel the anglo-Egyptian rulers of Sudan and famously to murder the Governor General, Charles "Chinese" Gordon in Khartoum. So impressed was Rudyard Kipling by the heroism of the Sudanese warrior-mystics, he eulogised them in his poem "Fuzzie Wuzzy". His admiring description, "You're a pore benighted 'eathen but a first-class fightin' man" might appear grimly familiar to modern British soldiers fighting Muslim foes in Afghanistan and Iraq.

After the performance had finished, I was approached by an array of curious locals, with whom I sat and drank tea. Some were Arab Muslims, some were not (the ethnically African south of Sudan is overwhelmingly Christian and/or Animist in its beliefs), but inevitably given our surroundings, the conversation eventually turned to religion. While the majority were simply curious about "Christian" ways (like most westerners in Muslim countries, when asked I pretend to be Christian, the concept of atheism not being well understood or well-regarded), it soon became apparent that one had a more sinister agenda, and he quickly began trying to back me into a corner. Despite my attempts at evasive diplomacy, the questions were relentless.

"What do you think of Islam?"

"Do you know that if you convert to Islam you will go to Paradise - if you don't you'll go to hell?"

"Why do Christians not believe in the Prophet Mohammed, Allah praise him?"

"Why do Christians allow their women to whore themselves?"

"Why do Christians...?

And so on and so forth. At this point I was getting a little flustered. Luckily, my audience shared my discomfort, and rounded on the interrogator angrily. Such was the vehemence with which he was condemned, my would be saviour slunk off into the night. The remaining Sudanese were appalled at this extremism, and clearly ashamed at the implied insults to a visitor in their country, and what's more to what Muslims call "people of the Book" - Christians and Jews. The apologies were sincere and profuse, and typical of the relaxed attitude to religion I have overwhelmingly found in Sudan. I finish with a quote from the Bradt Guide to Sudan, by Paul Clammer:

"More than just a religion, Islam is a social code that presents a specific way in which society should be run. As such, visitors have a particular responsibility to behave in a manner that's sensitive to local traditions, although the Sudanese are very tolerant and foreigners are usually forgiven for minor cultural gaffes."

Just be careful what you call your teddy bear.

Among The Bedu

The glowing embers of the fire illuminate the faces around the circle, and the charcoal scent of roasting meat wafts from the makeshift grill. Glass cups of sweet black shai glint in the flickering red-orange light as they're passed around, while overhead an astonishing canopy of stars dots the dark, moonless night sky with pinpricks of light drifting across the celestial wasteland of remote time and space. The wind blows gently across the silence of the desert, the only sounds the protesting grunts of the camels penned just behind us and the animated patter of rapid fire Arabic from my amiable Beduin companians.

Suddenly, as if by magic, there is the sound of loud music. The chords seem familiar, yet perhaps my mind is playing tricks on me? It couldn't be, surely? It is. A well-known husky voice growls the opening line, then another gravelly-sounding baritone interjects. Before Sting can add his guttural whine to Bryan Adams and Rod Stewart's wailing, a medley of heavily-accented cries rises from the manically-grinning Bedu as they sing along.

I'm in eastern Syria, sitting in the garden of a Beduin family with whom I'm spending the weekend. I came to visit the fabled Roman ruins of Palmyra; once, in another epoch, a hugely significant outpost on the Silk Road to the Orient, at its zenith ruled by the semi-mythical Queen Zenobia, purportedly a descendent of Cleopatra and Marc Anthony. The Zenobians, and the Romans, may have disappeared into the sands of the desert 18 centuries ago, leaving behind only dusty brown ruins, but not all the inhabitants of this area have been lost in the mists of time. The nomadic Bedu endure here, much as they have for countless millennia, eking a patchy living from the forbidding wastes of sand with camels and small flocks of livestock, wandering the desert with their black goat-hair tents, distinctive red and white checked keffiyehs, and legendary code of honour and hospitality.

Or so the story goes.

Few peoples have been as romanticised by Western travellers as the Bedu. Deified as timeless, immovable, immutable, much like the desert itself, the Bedu long ago ceased to be mere men in the eyes of awestruck orientalists. This race of supermen captivated desert explorers from the earliest days of Western encroachment in the orient. Revered by great men like Burton, Lawrence, and Thesiger for their apparently stubborn resistance to the influence of modernity and their refusal to alter their ancient way of life, these fairytale nomads perservere with their traditions of hospitality and welcome amid the inhospitable landscapes of the harshest, most unforgiving environment on earth.

I was introduced to Ahmed and his bewildering array of brothers, uncles, and cousins through a classmate in Damascus. Bedu hospitality being what it is, I was assured that "of course" there would be no problem in our showing up unannounced for a weekend. The welcome was predictably warm, the smiles sincere, and the tea predictably sweet. Yet far from anachronistic desert-dwellers, rejecting the advances of technology, "civilisation", and modernity, I found my expectations confounded by the often-confusing and contradictory reality of 21st century nomads. Camel-riding desert wanderers who use mobile phones and 4 wheel drives. Devout Muslims who worship Enrique Iglesias and Bryan Adams. Keffiyeh and jalabiyya-wearing fashion victims who argue vehemently over the relative merits of Giorgio Armani and Calvin Klein. Fiercely loyal traditionalists with a strong belief in the purity of their bloodlines who like nothing more than bedding Western tourists awestruck by the otherworldly beauty and exoticism of men who live in the desert.

Despite the late hour (it's well past 2am when we arrive), dinner is prepared and served with gusto. We sit cross-legged on the floor in the living room, a dizzying mosaic of carpets and rugs beneath us, low slung cushions at our backs. An ancient television in the corner shows reruns of what i take to be an Arabic version of Pop Idol. In the modern, globalised world, some things apparently cut across all cultural and linguistic boundaries: talentless masochistic wannabes lobotomised at birth included. The men, and they are all men, eat hungrily. Though it's late, or early, depending on your perspective, it will soon be dawn: the first rays of sunlight will bring the resumption of the Ramadan fast. The plates of humous, salad and chargrilled chicken are cleared away: we sleep where we eat.

Next morning Ahmed's designer jeans and t-shirt have been swapped for austere white robes and checked head-dress. The transformation is startling: suddenly he is no longer an urbane Westernised Syrian, but a desert-dwelling nomad. I fear my own borrowed keffiyeh effects less of a total metamorphasis on my appearance, though it does at least keep me cool as we ride camels to the nearby ruins. Palymra is certainly spectacular: in size, setting, and state of preservation it dwarfs anything in Turkey by a factor of at least ten. Yet given Syria's post 9-11 classification as a "rogue state" and "supporter of terrorism" by the West, the site is deserted. No tour buses or cruise ships here, al hamdu-li-Allah. Yet my hosts might disagree - the family business is tourism - as well as leading trips to the ruins and longer excursions into the desert, Ahmed owns a hotel in the nearby town of Tadmor. Other Bedu families earn a living (or not) in similar fashion: as a result of the slack market numerous camel-drovers and souvenir keffiyeh salesmen loiter languidly in the shade of Palmyra's ancient stones, scarcely a customer in sight.

Despite the tough times, Ahmed blanches at the suggestion of payment for our stay. As friends of a friend, Mauro and I are entitled to the full gamut of Bedu hospitality. Although their way of life is changing rapidly, some things remain the same. The Bedu will adapt their customs, just as they always have (contrary to popular belief, camels were a relatively recent addition to the nomads' arsenal of defences against the ravages of the desert), but Inshaallah their traditions of generosity and kindness to strangers will endure.

As I write this in a Damascus internet cafe, a familiar song plays on the radio. Bryan, Rod, and Sting croon the theme tune to The Three Musketeers. It occurs to me this makes a fitting motif for the Bedu and their ancient code of hospitality: "one for all and all for one." I prefer "Summer of 69" myself, but anyway...

Feast, Famine, and Men Who Hold Hands

As the sun slips behind the dusty brown mountains to the West, Damascus is bathed in a beautiful golden light. As the muezzins tune up for their hauntingly beautiful renditions of the call to evening prayer, the usual noise of rush hour traffic falls eerily silent as this bustling city of five million people quickly becomes a ghost town. As the dusk twilight fades into darkness, shutters come down and the last few stragglers hurry home, leaving the Syrian capital devoid of any outward signs of life. Yet behind the closed doors of countless houses, apartments and mosques in this, the fourth holiest site in Islam, friends and family sit down to celebrate.

For this is the holy month of Ramadan, a time of introspection, observance, and self-denial. All across the Islamic world the faithful eschew the pleasures of the flesh: eating, drinking, smoking, and sex, fasting during daylight hours and feasting in darkness. For one month of the year, Muslims remind themselves of their devotion to Allah, studying the Qu'ran, praying more often and with more focus than usual, and strengthening their communal ties by sharing the hardships of the holy month. Come sunset, hungry eyes turn to the home, where the traditional meal of Iftar ("breakfast") is served.

The feast begins with a bowl of dates, passed from (right) hand to (right) hand, and copious cups of "shai", the ubiquitous sweet black tea on which the Arab world appears to run. (My dentist should be in for a bumper payday come January) My own flat's Iftar has a particularly African feel: my landlord Djbril hails from Chad, and as far as I can tell runs an open house for every Chadian in the Levant. The boundless hospitality and generosity of the Chadians ensures I am invited to join their Iftar, despite my less than monastic adherence to the rigours of Ramadan. Although I am not, nor ever will be, a Muslim, I began the month with the noblest intentions - "when in Rome" and all. Yet ideals of cultural assimilation tend to fall by the wayside when the mercury is pushing 40 degrees Centigrade and you're struggling with the peculiarities of a language whose speech patterns often resemble the last desperate breaths of a strangled kitten and whose written form neglects to mark any vowels. Not eating is one thing, but not drinking is simply impossible. Still, while I may not share the parched throats of my fellow diners, I'm certainly hungry.

After the dates, we settle down to a huge feast of chicken, rice, potatoes, salad, and bread. Simple, yet delicious, African food served with a hearty helping of laughter, affection, and community spirit. While I can barely understand 5% of the rapid-fire Chadian "9aamiya" - dialect- in which Djbril and his compatriots usually communicate, when I understand the odd word they're kind enough to slip into "foussa" - the Modern Standard Arabic with which I'm struggling - for my benefit. Conversation quickly turns to politics and history; like almost all the Arabs I've ever met the Chadians' grasp of world affairs is simply mind-boggling. These are by no means educated people, yet as well as the obvious topics of Palestine and Iraq, beloved of all Arabs, they talk about such diverse and esoteric subjects as the American political system, the IRA (it took a while to work out, but "Adam Gerry" is their endearingly erroneous rendering of the bearded Sinn Fein leader's name) and demand to know if I am named after James I of England/James VI of Scotland, James Bond, or former American Secretary of State James Baker. The depth and breadth of their knowledge is staggering; even more appealing to me is their apparent inability to take any of these weighty matters seriously. As a Brit I'm gently taunted about the occupation of Iraq; one of my tormentors points out the sad state in which the British Empire finds itself in 2007, reduced to the Falkland Islands and Basra Airport.

After dinner we drink yet more tooth-rotting tea and retire to watch television: a four part dramatisation of the overthrow of Egypt's King Farouq by General Nasser in 1952. This provokes jokes about Britain's very own Egyptian would-be usurper, Mohammed al Fayad, and his son's near miss with the throne. Like many a Daily Express reader, the Chadians are in no doubt that Dodi and "Dina" were killed by the all-powerful British secret service. The question of quite where the omniscient and omnipotent SIS' powers went when it came to finding WMDs in Iraq is politely ignored.

The Chadians are typically Arab in many ways. This is a masculine society, where intimate physical contact between members of the same sex is totally normal. As in innumerable cities across the Arab and Muslim world, it's perfectly normal for men to hold hands in the street, to kiss each other's cheeks in greeting, and to share personal space in a way unthinkable in the West. Although I won't be attempting to verify this assertion myself, I imagine that in some ways life for homosexuals here must be much easier than in the West, despite Islam's virulent hatred of gays. (Interestingly there is apparently no non-pejorative term for "homosexual" in the Arabic language: "deviant" is about the least offensive word). Is it a coincidence that many of the greatest Western "Arabists" - Lawrence and Thesiger, to name but two - were perpetual residents of the closet?

Regardless of the inherently homoerotic nature of much of Islamic and Arab culture, life for heterosexuals here is certainly difficult. The schizophrenic attitude to procreation is perhaps best evidenced by the numerous Arabic equivalents of MTV. Pop music is ubiquitous here, most of it emanating from Lebanon and Egypt. While the music is mostly appalling, the videos are quite incredible. Impossibly good-looking young women cavort onscreen in outfits that would make even Britney, Christina, or Shakira blush, thrusting their crotches in a most provocative manner and titillating the viewers with lingering closeups of cavernous cleavage and tanned thighs. It's enough to send even hardened (pardon the pun) Westerners running for a cold shower; Allah only knows what it does to frustrated young Arabs.

Yet in amongst the nubile nymphets and their soft porn shoots are pop videos aimed at a wholly different audience. Saudi artists, all male, croon saccharine ballads with lyrics like (forgive my woeful Arabic here) "I love God, God is my love, my life is all for God". Meanwhile, their faith in Allah and their submission to the dictates of the supposedly austere Wahabist Islamic creed of their homeland are rewarded onscreen with shiny watches, gleaming droptop Mercedes, and of course a couple of "pimping hoes". Unlike Fifty Cent or P Diddy, however, the Saudi stars' bitches are covered from head to toe, and sport wedding rings. All three of them. The message is clear: love God and a harem of devoted (though virginal) women will be yours. Inshallah you'll get a German sports car to drive them around in too.

As the shahada rings out across the now darkened city, a couple of middle aged men hurry past me, arms linked gaily. On the other side of the street, a young man and his stylishly dressed girlfriend walk side by side, a couple of feet apart. And in houses across the country, across the region, across the world, self-starved Muslims desperately gorge themselves in a feast of gluttony before tomorrow's resumption of the fasting, praying, and abstention of the holy month. Allah-uh akbar!

Be Careful What You Wish For

It's 5am. I sit in a dingy smoke-filled room with fake wood panels on the walls, drinking my thirty-fourth cup of tea of the evening. It seems my fervent prayers to the travel gods have been answered, and I will after all get to see the real Turkey, away from the tourist hordes. I'm in a motorway service station somewhere between Antioch and Alexandretta, waiting for a bus. Glamourous though it may sound, those two cities stopped being interesting around the seventh century AD; regardless of which, I'm not sure this tea and kebab joint by a highway was ever really a highlight of the country even in Seljuk or Mamluk times. No-one here speaks English, I've asked three people to point out our location on the map of Turkey in my Lonely Planet "Middle East" and got three totally different answers, and I can't quite shake the feeling I've been abandoned to my fate by the Sula Bus Company. Still, looking on the bright side, at least there are no tourists here...

To pass the time I read. As I turn the pages of Alexander Maitland's compelling biography of the late Wilfred Thesiger, the legendary British explorer as famed for his total rejection of modern Western civilisation as for his incredible desert traverses in Sudan, Ethiopia, Libya and Saudi Arabia, I wonder what the likes of Thesiger would make of my predicament. Not a great deal probably; when you're the first man to traverse the impassable "Empty Quarter" of southern Arabia, you've lived with the Marsh Arabs in southern Iraq for seven years, and you count the Abbysinian Emperor the Ras Tefari Haile Selassi as a close personal friend, you probably don't regard Turkish truck stops as much of an adventure. Nevertheless, after a couple of weeks spent hanging out with people whose idea of "exploring" is finding a Starbucks in Istanbul, I feel suitably off the beaten track. Particularly because as time passes it seems more and more likely that I'll be seeing out the rest of my days here at this Anatolian version of a Happy Eater.

I console myself with the fact that given twenty years of sitting here I should at least have grasped the rudiments of basic Turkish. Until this morning I was rather proud of the fifty or so words (twenty of which are the numbers 1-20 I must admit) of Turkish I'd picked up; the ability to order a beer, some hummous, and a chicken shish kebab, and ask the price all earned me much appreciated kudos from the locals - on one occasion, at Ephesus I chuckled smugly to myself as a barechested Brit with a Cockney accent and a Manchester City tattoo on his left bicep (glory supporter?) paid 4 euros for the same glass of orange juice I'd just picked up for 2 lira using my amazing new Turkish skills. Now, however, as I attempt to enunciate such complex phrases as "no I don't want more sodding tea, where the fuck is the bus?", I realise the limit of my capabilities in this particular tongue was reached just after I learned "thank you" ("teshekur ederrim" if you wanted to know).

Eventually, after a couple of years, the relevant bus arrived, and I was charged a further twenty lira for the privilege of a seat, thus leaving me with the princely sum of six Turkish lira to my name. "Still", I thought, "there's bound to be a cash machine at the bus station in Antioch". After around five hours of travelling through scenery that alternated between the spectacular vistas of mountains, plains, and Mediterranean in the countryside, and the slightly less spectacular industrial dystopias of steelworks and gas refineries that dot the towns along Turkey's southeastern coast, we finally arrived at the desolate and remote Antakya Otogar: situated, of course, a good few miles from anywhere, and notable for the singular absence of any holes in the wall from which to remove hard currency. Once again I faced the less than ideal prospect of taking up permanent residency in a remote Turkish bus station.

On this occasion, however, I had not taken into consideration the legendary hospitality of the Arabs (for the cynics out there, no, that doesn't involve orange jumpsuits, beheadings, and YouTube). For the bus company was Syrian, the passengers were all Syrian, and as a guest in their country (well, nearly), they were obligated to look after me. Code of the desert you see: one day they may be passing my, er, tent, and be in desperate need of hospitality. Most of the Arabs may not live in the desert any longer, but the old ways live on. "Only six lira, no problem! Welcome to Syria! Have a chocolate chip cookie." "Mmm...don't mind if I do. Shukran". It will doubtless surprise many of you to learn this, but because of Islam's roots in the Arabian desert, such hospitality is customary not just in Arab states, but across the Muslim world (though some of the Iraqis might admittedly have let standards slip a little lately). In Rory Stewart's "The Places In Between", the former British diplomat's incredible tale of his walk from Tehran to Kathmandu in 2002, the Afghan mujehideen's desperate desire to kill an infidel Westerner (and what's more, a Brit) in their midst is tempered by Stewart's status as a visitor in their lands. Instead of chopping his head off they kill the fatted goat and let him sleep in their front rooms. I'm not recommending you try this at home or anything, but...

Anyway, after a very pleasant sojourn through the formalities at the Turkish-Syrian border, I arrived in Aleppo. Syrian immigration is quite something: polite and friendly guards sit beneath posters in a multitude of languages advising guests to report any "troublesome behaviour" from Immigration officials to their supervisor; furthermore "if this does not resolve you issue, please call Minister of Interior, phone number 337676". No, I haven't tried it yet, before you ask. You're welcome to give him a call though. Next to each of these posters, indeed all over Syria from what I can see, stands the image of a shy-looking man, seemingly much more suited to the life of a provincial optician than military dictator of one of the founder members of the infamous "Axis of Evil". This is, of course, President Bashar al-Asad, Syria's number one opthalmic surgeon, and also lifetime ruler. At least I know where to go if my contact lenses start playing up in Damascus then. As a fellow University of London alumnus I'm sure old Bashar would love to hear from me. We could compare notes on Crush and Cocktails, and bemoan the expense of being a student in London. No?

Well, bus adventure aside, I certainly feel I'm off the tourist trail here in Aleppo. Crossing the border from Turkey was like crossing into a different world. Arab and Muslim dress abound here, everything closes early today, the Sabbath, and people in the street address me in Arabic, not cliched English of the "lubbly jubbly, good price for you friend" variety. Syria's second city is everything I hoped it would be: the great souk is like every fairytale of the Orient come true at once, the Christian Quarter is an openair archaeology museum, and the locals couldn't be friendlier. I even saw my first roadsign for Baghdad earlier, as if to emphasise the fact that this is the real Middle East. Still, I think I'll stick with Syria - I hear Iraq is overrun with British and American visitors these days, and something tells me the locals are a little more welcoming here.