Sunday 27th December - Dayr as Zawr

My first bout of food poisoning had me up shortly after going to bed and I was reacquainted with the falafel warp I'd had earlier for dinner. Anne was fine, so I'm not sure what caused it as we'd eaten the same things yesterday. It had me feeling a bit off this morning, but I decided that fresh air would do me good so we carried on with the plan of visiting Dura Europos and Mari, close to the Iraqi border.

Dura Europos is a Greek/Roman fortress city overlooking the Euphrates, larger in scale than Rustafa but the remains are not quite as impressive. Luckily the caretaker let us in as he says that normally the site is shut on Sundays (he didn't let the next tourists in, who had to watch us wander around from the battlements). There were some helpful signs as otherwise we would have little idea as to what many of the remains were, but it was clearly a centre of religious study, with a dozen temples, a church and a synagogue. SPOT

We picked up another tail as we left Dura Europos, this time an orange Kia with two men which accompanied us to Mari, where they waited until we left. I'm sure they were just concerned with our safety.

At Mari we were only about 15km from Iraq, but neither of us was tempted to go any closer.

The Mari mud-brick ruins date back 5000 years and are centred on a 300 room palace, the remains of which are now under a protective roof. We wondered how you go about excavating a mud building from the surrounding mud, but they seem to have managed it with the palace walls measuring over 3 meters in height. Mari was famous for its ceramics, fragments of which still litter the site, and they also used one of the World's oldest written scripts. SPOT

We bumped into a lone female tourist who we had seen earlier in the day at Dura Europos and gave her a lift back to Dayr as Zawr. Isabelle is a teacher from Germany whoís on a two week return trip to Syria, having first visited last summer (too hot she said). She's travelling on her own but says she hasn't experienced any problems, and we both admired her independence.

The evening was spent relaxing and sorting ourselves out for moving on tomorrow, I also no longer feel the need to throw up which is all good.