"Bus ride From Hell"! mwah har ha!

Here's the thing, I’d been told that I better take the bus at 12.30 because that was the direct bus and would take me only about 24 hours and not 30 like the one that stopped in Antakya where I’d have to change buses. Great I thought… it makes it a lot more bearable to travel 24 hours overland if you don’t have to stop 15 hours into it and move all your stuff on to another bus.

Ah ha!! How misled I was by this travel agent woman! The first thing I ask the driver when I arrive at the bus station is “is this bus to Damascus? Damascus? Damascus?” The sign at the front of the bus says Antakya, but I am constantly reassured that in fact it’s going to Damascus… ok, ok, I think maybe I am being paranoid, maybe the bus just came from Antakya and the sign is still up… so I hop on the bus and make myself comfortable.

Ok, so this is a Turkish bus and no one seems to speak English, French or Arabic (you have three languages at your disposal and it doesn’t help?!?!?). The woman sitting next to me knows some Arabic, but my diminished knowledge can’t take in her Turkish accent/Turkish words into much sense. Also she seems to be confused about where Damascus is located in the Arab world and tells the driver Beirut! Beirut! I am not going to Beirut!!!! So I start with him Damascus! Damascus! Too bizarre! The driver once again assures me I’m going to Damascus, okay, okay…

It’s at this stage that the rain starts, it is absolutely pissing down. The sun is setting, and the roads are busy. So as I am sitting in seat number six I had a nice view of the traffic we’re weaving in and out of and also the hills and such we’re passing through the windscreen. It’s when I realise something… I can’t actually see the road anymore, but we’re still moving… so I wonder... why doesn’t the driver put on the windscreen wipers?

Ah! There are no windscreen wipers! Oh my God. We are going 120km down a highway on a dodgy bus with no windscreen wipers and it’s dark and raining. Surprisingly enough I found it quite hard to relax.

A few hours into the trip at one of the stops who should board the bus but ‘Young Mother’ and ‘Crying Baby’ oh great, please dear god don’t let them sit near me, so naturally they sit right behind me.

At this point in time I would like to give my love and admiration to all mothers. Not because you have to put up with crying babies, but because you have to put up with every other person around you being an expert on the matter of crying babies and how to make them stop. This includes, 14 year old boys who decide that whistling at the baby is surely the best way to get it to stop crying… The baby got on at about 9pm and by about 1.30am all the bus, still wide awake, had offered their opinions.

Right now is where the ‘unscheduled stops’ began. The driver – as expert as the rest, decided that the baby for sure would need some fresh air (in my humble opinion the baby just needed to goddamn sleep and the bus’ lights, everyone having a go of holding him and the whistling wasn’t really the right way to go about it! But I kept this advice to myself and patiently tried to sleep). Anyway getting fresh air a few times, stopping to heat up milk and so on, and everyone was complaining about the fact that the bus was going to be late.

It must have been round 3 am when it all became too much for the mother, who yelled at the steward and started crying herself. So now there was crying mother and crying baby crying together. This then led to shaking of the baby in a vain attempt to finally stop him crying and which, obviously led to more crying and unscheduled stops.

… But hey, at least the rain had stopped…

At Dawn we eventually we stopped in what appears to be a scheduled stop as everyone seems to be getting off. In fact I am informed we have to get off, as our luggage is being unloaded but this I can tell you is definitely not Damascus (plus it’s only been (a long) 18 hours on the bus).

So I am mildly informed by the woman who was sitting in front of me the entire bus ride who – has suddenly decided she speaks English (despite my desperate pleas to any English speakers on the whole bus earlier in the trip) – that I have to change buses for Damascus.

“Great (No worries – worse things have happened than this, it’s just a bus change – and you’re in a bus station so that’s a bonus). When is it?”

“We just missed it, it was at 5.30am” (Damn crying baby unscheduled stops!!) (It’s now 6.15am)

“Great (You know there are several buses to take each day, Lonely Planet told you so). When’s the next bus?”

She didn’t know so I had to go down to the office and find out. It’s 12.30… great 6 hour wait at border town… love it really!

The second bus took about 7 hours, including a 1 hour stop at the Turkish border and another hour or so at the Syrian border. The fact that there was no air-conditioning and I was sweating like a pig (hey it was only 45 degrees Celsius outside) didn’t bother me nearly as much as the 1950’s Syrian movie with songs that I couldn’t even watch if I’d wanted to because the woman next to me was speaking rapidly to me in Romanian like I was meant to understand.
Finally 36 hours (only 12 hours more than I thought it would take originally) I arrived in Damascus. I even let the taxi driver rip me off because I didn’t care anymore. At least I was there where and I could find out all about my course etc. and as they’d say Alhamdulliah (Thank God!). I had arrived.