We woke up in our room at the Safwan and decided to indulge in a little bathing.

We had not done so in quite some time. In part because the arid climate of Syria kept us pretty dry, which made us feel clean, and in part because the poor quality of the showers at our beloved Hotel Ziad Al Kabir in Damascus had been quite the deterrent.  In fact, Scott later disclosed to us that he had been afraid even to use the bathrooms for missions more serious than urination.

So it was in an atypically shiny and manageable state that we emerged from the Safwan, hopped on our cycles, and headed out into Latakia, in search, unsurprisingly, of coffee. Not far into the search, as we were driving by a central park, we spotted a fellow wheeler who had attached a few of those Jordanian style giant coffee urns to his cycle.

We decided we had better try some and found it to be truly delicious and mind bogglingly cheap. So we propped the bikes up against a wall and began to settle down for a few cups.

While we were drinking coffee and admiring the fellow’s cycle, a man wandered up to us and introduced himself as Samer.

He was excited to learn about our trip, and brought us over to take a look at his car.

It was a Chevrolet pickup truck, of which he rightly assumed we would approve being Americans. As we were taking a look at the car, a giant water truck showed up and began hosing down the streets with a mighty high pressure hose. The fellows running the hose were also quite friendly, and made sure not to soak us, which was no small task, such a torrent were they handling.

When we asked Samer to a recommend a good breakfast joint, we found ourselves quickly and inescapably compelled to eat breakfast with him. So off we went together, Samer driving his black and yellow striped Chevy, and we following behind.

He led us to a very local establishment, which sported a simple, but tantalizing menu. They offered piping hot homemade flatbread, hummus, babajanouj, pickles, and plates of tomatoes and onions. Despite the simplicity of the menu, it was obviously a popular local hang out, just filled with people. Each table sported a fantastic aluminum oil-can shaped olive oil dispenser and a few ramekins of spices – salt, cumin, and paprika. At Samer’s direction, we ordered a few of everything on the menu, and were just blown out of the water by what arrived.

The hummus was delightful, thick and oily, with a few whole chick peas thrown in.  The pickles were crunchy and delicately flavored. The bread was steaming and soft, with just a hint of crunchy brown exterior.

As we ate the, owner of the place came out to chat with us. He too was very interested to learn what we were doing in Syria on these bikes. Samer seemed proud to have us there, and we were certainly proud to be there with him. At the end of the meal, the customary free tea was brought out to the table, each small cup accompanied by a rather giant egg-cup sized serving of sugar. They were certainly into massively sweet tea in this country.

After we had eaten, the owner took us for a little tour of the operation.

The tour took place quite diligently underneath a giant poster of the president of Syria, Bashar Al Assad, the leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, and the late brother of Mr. Bashar Al-Assad, Basil.

It was clearly an institution.

Full of hummus and bread, and feeling just great, we bid our new friend goodbye, pausing to take a group shot before hitting the road.

A fellow wheeler showed up, just as we were executing the shot, and joined in as well. The more the merrier, we figured.

Then we headed out into Latakia, excited to learn more about this city. We first plunged down to the coastline, where we caught sight of the same blue Mediterranean that we’d swam in in Lebanon. The temperature and the humidity were rising quickly as the day wore on. And as we continued to wheel down the coast, we realized the easy to handle dry air of Damascus had given way to a downright sticky climate now that we’d reached the seaside.

We spotted a local public beach, and headed down a gravel drive to investigate. Soon the gravel drive turned into more of a hiking trail, which in turn dissolved into a path too gnarly for our bikes. So we carried our cycles the last few meters to the beach, where we were able to climb back on and continue wheeling, now over hard packed sand.

The beach was very popular, with all kinds of stands selling various goods, food, and even haircuts. We wheeled back up onto the road, where we saw a large wooden ship’s hull that was perhaps being repaired in the middle of the street. It had obviously been there a while now, for traffic had parted around it so frequently as to have worn new roads into the packed sandy ground.

As we wheeled on, we soon found ourselves in a decidedly new, and decidedly poorer neighborhood. We were forced to stop from time to time, as Claudia was starting to feel none too well in the stomach. Despite our repeated questions as to whether or not she would rather turn back, Claudia was determined to continue wheeling, which we respected.

And so on we went, deep into what we would soon learn was the Palestinian refugee neighborhood.

Claudia had become increasingly in need of a rest room, and so we began stopping from time to time to ask to use a business’ facilities. Unfortunately, all the businesses seemed to have no bathrooms for women, so we wheeled on, hoping Claudia would be able to continue to hang in there. She did, of course, and valiantly, until we were able to find a nice restaurant that granted her admission to its restroom.

As we rode on, we saw all kinds of interesting pro-Palestinian graffiti, unpacking of which is more than encouraged in the comments. Along with the graffiti, we stumbled upon a number of interesting plaques and posters. This wheel was proving unusually fascinating.

Soon we turned off the main streets, and began wheeling the alleyways, cutting across the refugee neighborhoods, stopping from time to time to check on Claudia and to drink water. We were sweating profusely in this city.

As we rode by, the locals were extremely welcoming, calling out to us, and smiling as we cruised past. Soon we were dumped onto a particularly muddy and traffic snarled street, from which we made our way back up toward the center of town.

As we rode, we passed this interesting operation, which seemed to be sporting a roof doubling as a refuse storage zone.

We were joined part way back by quite the obnoxious gang of little wheelers-in-training, and soon we found ourselves so harassed, that we began pondering ways to lose them.   They had been swerving in front of us dangerously and shouting at us in languages we couldn’t understand, coming up so close to us, that we feared we might lock handlebars and both go sprawling into the filthy street. Something needed to be done.

And it was thus that we ended in an uphill struggle to outpace them on the climb back to the high ground of the city center. The superior gearing and general hardware of our Dahons was in our favor, but the kids were tough and Claudia was weakened with sickness.

So we struggled on, climbing, and steadily gaining ground. Somewhere around this stand where kids were selling circular pretzels, we saw our chance to shake them and took it, pulling a quick unexpected licht onto a very busy street.

Suddenly we were on a slight downhill and began to pick up speed fast. We could hear them shouting behind us, but we had good headway now.

By the time we whipped by this very well branded intelligence agency building, we were pretty sure we’d lost them.

Now the sun was hanging low, and we were back in the city center, where we headed around the large roundabout and continued back to the vicinity of the Safwan, which turned out to be in the container port district.

We had to stop when we saw this very violent faceless scarred head statue.

If anyone can tell us more about it in the comments, we would be truly grateful. With bikes parked next to the scarred head, we sauntered over to a viewing platform and watched containers being moved around by giant clawed machines, as the sun set over the port of Latakia.

That next morning, as we woke up amidst the sleeping hordes at Talal’s New Hotel, Claudia was not feeling well. She had managed to pick up a food-born pathogen that Scott and I had somehow escaped. As a result, the team was moving very slowly, hopping from bathroom to bathroom, making our way from the hotel to breakfast, which we decided it would be easiest to execute back at the Le Chef.

Moving so slowly through the city gave us plenty of time to notice and appreciate the strikingly European buildings that were all around us. It was still AsiaWheeling, but there was certainly not a lot of Asia in this place.

Breakfast seemed to do little to help Claudia’s state, and so we returned her to the hotel, where she would spend the day relaxing. Meanwhile, Scott and I headed out to the meeting with Red Bull, with Claudia safe and sound, and hopefully on the mend, in the company of the owner of Talal’s New Hotel. The owner was unfortunately not named Talal. He was, however, a self proclaimed nurse and promised to take good care of our dear West Asia Cultural Liaison.

So with that we hopped on the Speed TRs, just the two of us again, and began wheeling toward a certain Starbucks, a few kilometers down the coast in the less touristy business district of Beirut.  Wheeling to the place was certainly raw. We made our way along a very large and busy road. The traffic was fast, and cyclists were very uncommon, which meant that our fellow travelers knew little about what to do when they encountered a cyclist in front of them. At one point on the wheel, Scott caught his long broken dynamo hub-powered light in his spoke, which made a sickening sound and savagely bent the thing. We stopped to tear the broken light off and tighten the spot back up, then hit the road once again. We rode fast, signaling our intent early and often, and eventually we made it to the Starbucks.

Not long after we’d sat down, and well before our sweat soaked shirts had begun to dry, we spotted a laid back, sunglassed character wandering into the shop, making that kind of tentative eye contact that is so common among those who are scanning a room for someone they’ve never met before. It must have been Mueen, our Red Bull contact, and we walked over to make ourselves obvious.

He was indeed Mueen, and he stuck out his hand, and introduced himself. We then sat down and enjoyed the biggest cup of coffee we’d had since we’d arrived from the Gulf. We discussed AsiaWheeling’s philosophy of travel, our adventure to date, and the role that caffeine plays in our lifestyle. You see, dear reader, we ride, day in day out, on some of the gnarliest traffic in the world, literally taking our lives in our hands each day. Preserving our lives requires alertness, vigilance, and lucidity. The number one thing that we can do to encourage that state of mind is to sleep plenty each night, and practice good wheeling technique. But sometimes that just won’t get you there. So thank goodness there’s also caffeine.

We had enjoyed the added lucidity and energy that came along with all the Red Bull we drank while road tripping the Gulf, and we were excited to add it to our lifestyle again.

With the coffees done, we headed around behind the Starbucks, and folded the cycles throwing them into the back of our new friend’s SUV, for the drive over to Red Bull HQ. As we rode, we discussed Lebanon and Lebanese food. “You know of this salad called the fattoush?” he asked. Of course we did, having been eating it nearly daily for a month now. “You see there was a time in Lebanon when there was not much food to go around. We invented this dish as a way to avoid wasting our stale flatbread. The hard, stale bread would be crumbled, blended in with greens, and dressed with oil..” The notion certainly sounded great to us.

Mueen then asked us when we’d last eaten. The answer was, of course, a few hours ago at the Le Chef not far from our hotel. But that seemed enough time to him to be justified in insisting we stop at a restaurant on the way, specializing in a local flatbread called Manakish.

Once there, Mueen ordered us two, and a couple of bottles of Ayran, the local salty yogurt drink.

We finished those as we battled the traffic to get the rest of the way to the headquarters. Inside, we were quickly introduced to the team, all of whom were fantastic people.

We spent a particularly large amount of time chatting with the head of the “sports” division, which in Lebanon, at least, consists largely of motorsports. To give us an illustration, he and Mueen shared a few of their “drifting” videos with us.

For those of you who do not know what drifting is, it’s a motorsport in which the driver exceeds the amount of torque that can be placed on his wheels sending them spinning in smoking, screeching blurs against the ground, and launching his car sliding around a parking lot, drifting like a pat of butter in a hot pan, left and right on burning rubber. Red Bull had sponsored a number of such competitions in Lebanon. And I must admit, the videos were pretty impressive, with the drivers squealing in manic arcs through open lots, around cones, and even through the tight corners of parking garages.

Having finally caught our fill of drifting videos, we headed out to grab some cases of Red Bull and strap them to the bikes.

It felt great to strap so much delightful elixir to our Speed TRs, and we made sure to pause for a group photo before splitting.

And then off we went, back downhill and into town, working our way toward the hotel where we hoped to find Claudia  on the mend.

It took us a while to get back, as we battled traffic, laden down with Red Bull, and confused by the lack of signage.

We were forced to stop quite a few times to ascertain our position. Luckily, plenty of the locals spoke bits and pieces of English and all knew where our hotel’s night club district was. So eventually we succeeded in arriving back at Talal’s New Guesthouse to find Claudia looking better, but still far from 100%.

From there, the three of us wheeled to the bus station, which was hidden in an enclave underneath a giant raging highway. In true AsiaWheeling style, we bought the last three tickets on the next bus to Byblos, and commenced sitting around and waiting for our departure time.

I sat down on the side of the platform and played the uke, while Scott chatted with the locals, and Claudia snoozed against a pile of bags, cases of Red Bull, and folding bicycles. In a short while, the bus arrived and we climbed on.

It was a surprisingly short ride to Jbeil, which is the Lebanese name for the city, which surrounds Byblos, and it seemed only seconds later that we climbed off into the night. It was not a touristy bus, evidenced by the fact that we were the only people to get off in Jbeil. With all our bags unloaded and piled nearby, we took a moment to take stock of our surroundings. We were on a street corner, next to the inter-city highway. There were a group of Lebanese army officers nearby us, holding fancy automatic weapons, and scrutinizing our behavior. We openly scrutinized them back, and watched as a few more of them arrived with bags of falafel wraps, handing them out to all the soldiers.

Claudia headed over to ask directions to the center of town, while Scott and I unfolded the cycles. Then we were wheeling again. It was not a big place, and finding our way to the center was quite easy. We checked out a few of the hotels in the city center, but found them all to be well over $100 a night. Even with Claudia sick, we needed some place cheaper, so we wheeled on.

It suddenly became apparent that it was time to eat again, so we pulled over at a shawarma place, and ordered some wraps.

The wraps were delightful and we were even able to plug in our computers and consult the Lonely Planet. The news was not good. It seemed that the entire city was essentially devoid of reasonably priced accommodation. There was one place though, called the King George Inn, which was only $60 a night. This, we decided, would be our next target.

And so with that, we left Claudia to look after our stuff, and continued to compute, while Scott and I headed out on what turned out to be quite the lengthy uphill battle toward the King George.

When we finally arrived, we found the place to be staffed by a very friendly young man, by the name of Tony, and his somewhat curmudgeonly father. The asking prices turned out to be significantly more than what was printed in our perhaps outdated Lonely Planet, but after a fair bit of inspecting of rooms, and heavy bargaining with the son, we were able to arrive upon something that we figured would be manageable for a couple days at least.

We then began haggling over what would be a fair price to have them drive us back down the hill to pick up Claudia and the bags. That too was a tedious affair, but eventually we found common ground.

So we climbed into the father’s shiny black Mercedes, marveling at how Lebanese people all drive such fancy cars, and headed down to pick up Claudia. The man spoke very little English, but was quite fluent in French. So I tried on my old French skills from Grinnell Public High School and began to converse in a most broken way. As we drove on, chatting imprecisely, the father began to renege on all our agreed-upon pricing and started once again inflating the room toward $100. When he found that Claudia was also going to be sleeping there, he redoubled his efforts.

We waited him out, though, and eventually through continued exhausted bargaining and general pricing shtick, we arrived at the same price as before, turned over our passports for registration, and collapsed into bed.

We woke up once again amidst the sea of bodies at Talal’s New Hotel in Beirut and headed out in search of breakfast and connectivity. The hotel had advertised wireless Internet, but the wireless network was actually more like a tiny drizzle of information, which was being split between countless unwashed laptop-toting backpackers, where actually loading a page was an excuse to celebrate.

We had been corresponding over e-mail with our Red Bull contacts in Lebanon, and we needed to call them to confirm a meeting for the next day. Doing this over Skype, on this network, at least, would be impossible, so we set out in search of SIM cards.

Before we got too deep into that endeavor, however, we would need to feed ourselves. Today we headed out in the opposite direction, searching for breakfast.

We ended up selecting an interesting and quite delicious place, by the name of “Le Chef.” It was decently affordable, and massively tasty. The staff was also quite fascinating, for they had been trained to yell at people as they passed by on the street, and to whoop in celebration when people entered the place. However, in all other interactions they were the most somber, understated and disinterested service people you’d encounter anywhere. They were particularly baffled when Scott and Claudia came in, but I lingered outside, doing some quick repairs on Claudia’s bike, whose chain had lost tension. They ended up whooping twice in false alarm as I busied myself with her Speed D7.

Stomachs full, we picked up once again the search for SIM cards. After repeated attempts to purchase them, however, we were sorely disappointed to discover that even the cheapest cards were in excess of $50 USD. After paying only two or three bucks in most of the countries we had visited to date, this seemed positively ridiculous. So we decided to head out in search of a payphone, ducking in and out of the little call shops which are attached to many of the gas stations here. Payphone prices too seemed unreal, charging 60-75 cents a minute for local calls, so we wheeled on, determined to find a way to make the contact without paying more than a night in a Chinese business hotel to do so.

Finally we were able to locate a seaside beach-resort-restaurant-and-bar type place, which allowed us to make a call for free on one of their waiter’s cell phones. Scott paced around, triumphantly talking with the folks at Red Bull and scribbling data onto a spare AsiaWheeling business card. Meanwhile Claudia supported our benefactors by purchasing some ice cream.

With the meeting all set for tomorrow, and directions to our meeting place in hand, we left in high spirits and climbed onto the Speed TRs. We headed back up the hill that overlooked that classic Beirut seaside view, and made our way back down the gentle incline toward the city’s many beaches. We had strapped swimsuits and sunscreen to the bikes and had all intents and purposes to spend the day at the beach.

Most of the beaches, however, were attached to swanky clubs and restaurants, and charged for entrance. We were much more interested in finding the people’s beach. So we wheeled on for some time,  when we spotted a particularly beautiful section of coastline that was not your classic sandy beach, but did appear to be a people’s swimming hole. We decided to take a Rauschenberg and head in to investigate.

We made our way down the cliff, along a rather treacherous stretch of gravel road to the seaside, where we found plenty of people swimming and fishing in close proximity, along with a plethora of cobbled together structures that  housed restaurants, bars, and hookah spots.

We locked the bikes next to a bunch of fisherman’s mopeds, and headed out on foot, picking our way over the rock formations and following the sound of people yelling and splashing in the water.

The swimming hole we found was gorgeous. It consisted of deep, crystal clear blue water, surrounded by startling picturesque cliffs. The water was easily approached by the network of large plate-like formations that were so emblematic of this coastline. We found an open spot on the rocks and began to relax.

I whipped out the ukulele, and we began to strum and sing. Soon we attracted the attention of some picnicking Lebanese chillers, who invited us over to join them. They were all college age chaps, enjoying an idle summer soaking up rays in Beirut. They spoke only a tiny bit of English, but we managed to joke around and even find a few songs that overlapped between their taste and what I knew on the ukulele.

Before we knew it, the sun was sinking low and it was time to jump in the water. So in I went. The water was cool and welcoming. It was also plenty salty, making it quite easy to float. Getting out of the water, on the other hand, was none too easy. The tide was low enough that the rim of the rocky plate was about two feet above me. So I watched the other swimmers and studied their methods. It seemed that the way to get back on land was to wait for a wave to come in, and let it take you up high enough to grab onto the edge of the plate and scramble up.

I swam over slowly, biding my time, and paying attention to the approaching waves. As I got closer to the edge of the plate, I could see that it was indeed a very lively place, covered with sea plants, and all kinds of little spiny creatures moving around, squirting out little jets of water, and generally being crustaceous. I took a deep breath and hoped I was not about to get a torso-full of sea urchin spines and began to scramble.

It worked, and with only a few minor slices, I made it back onto the rocks. It must have looked gnarly, for neither Scott nor Claudia followed me in.

We continued to idle there with our new friends until the sun sank below the horizon.

The next morning we woke up in our room at the Ziad Al Khabir Hotel and hopped right on the cycles to head out in search of new experiences in Damascus. We wheeled directly out of the Sudanese flophouse district, near the old city, and into the newer, richer, flashier, university district.

We ended up selecting some food from a “Chicken from the Machine” joint, and supplementing it with a few salads from a nearby salad joint. While Scott and Claudia dealt with the chicken, I headed over to the salad place, to make our selection. While I was waiting for the diligent chaps there to put together our order, I chatted with the owner, who had spent the last 15 years working and living in Saudi Arabia, in the kitchen of a similar salad place.

When I asked him about his views on the country, he described it as a clean place, with lots of money and opportunity. “It is a place for good Muslims and rich Muslims,” he said. When I asked him what brought him back to Syria, he commented, “Damascus is my home,” and added with a chuckle, “and I must say I was neither a rich nor a good Muslim.”

And with that he handed me my salads. We bid each other farewell. He assured me that if I returned, he would happily call his friend to hold down the shop for a few hours so we could drink tea and talk more about the world. I thanked him warmly for the offer and walked back out into the dry warm air and the sunshine. I was falling hard for Syria as I walked back toward the park where we’d all agreed to meet.

I found Scott and Claudia setting up shop at a picnic table. A group of schoolgirls had gathered round them, and were in the process of queuing up to take the Speed TRs for a ride around the park.  While they took turns riding the Dahons, we dug into our little picnic feast.

With that done, we headed out in search of coffee and a little wifi, which while it had been nigh on impossible to find in Jordan, proved quite plentiful here in Syria. We decided to have our first cup from a roadside espresso bar ,which we cycled past. The coffee was delicious, and the fellow who owned the place was a delight to interact with, humming little haunting bits of melody as he pulled the rich frothy shots.

We ended up more fully setting up shop at a café a few blocks down the way, where we were able to, for the price of a few more cups of coffee, connect to the Internet and finally begin to make a more serious dent into our long neglected electronic lives.

After working for a few hours, we hopped back on the bikes and began pedaling once again through the fascinating streets of Damascus. We stopped on a large triangular median so Claudia could ask a couple of fellows, who were sitting on plastic chairs watching the traffic, for directions. They were supremely helpful, if somewhat boisterous, and we hung with them for a while discussing our trip to date, and our quickly growing infatuation with Syria.

Back on the road, we quickly found ourselves engulfed in quite the traffic jam, which encouraged us to head out on a more atypical route, attempting to avoid the smothering exhaust of the gridlock, and bringing us, somewhat unexpectedly, back around to the other side of the old city. So we decided to work our way through the old city, riding through the tiny streets, and reveling in the richness of our surroundings.

Suddenly it was time to eat again, so we picked up a few 30-cent shawarma wraps on the street. Here in Syria, the shawarma comes with the most delectable garlic mayonnaise. In case we had not underlined it in previous posts, AsiaWheeling has a real soft spot for mayo, and this was certainly some of the best mayo of my life.

Armed with the sandwiches, we headed a block or so down the road and leaned our bikes against the ornate doors of a museum.

However, no sooner had we begun to eat than, low and behold, the great iron doors began to open. We hustled to move our bikes in time to let a team of grunting and sweating fellows move some giant panes of glass into the place.

On our way back, we headed to the large covered market, to give it another once over. It was certainly an impressive concentration of buyers and sellers, and thanks to the giant patchwork of tarpaulin that covered it, the midday heat and sun had done little to slow the rate of commerce.

On our way out of the covered market, we passed a couple of fellows with this modified bicycle.

It had been modified so that it could be powered by a tiny little deafening gasoline engine. They offered us a ride on the thing, but, not confident in our ability to pilot the beast, and fearing for our lives, we declined. Instead, we just settled, rather, on a demonstration of the starting of the motor.

From there, we headed out of the old city, and found ourselves briefly getting trapped in a large and smoggy bus terminal.

Navigating out of the byzantine overpasses, we stumbled upon a quite ancient looking courtyard, where a number of people had set up touristy shops.

As soon as we got off the bikes to poke around, we were swarmed by children interested in taking the Speed TRs for a ride.

We obliged, and while we wandered around, the kids raced in circles through the courtyard, whooping, yelling, and generally exhibiting the common response among individuals first exposed to a folding cycle.

From there, we headed back out onto the streets. The sun was growing low now, and we paused outside a large unsettling-poster vendor, while Scott wandered around through the Syrian rush hour pedestrian traffic, chatting with his parents on the phone.

From there, we found ourselves unexpectedly wheeling into a mechanical components dealership part of town. When we caught sight of an NSK bearings dealership, we immediately called a waypoint. NSK is our favorite bearings manufacturer, and we decided we might as well indulge in a few spares, in case one of our wheels started eating bearings again as Scott’s had in Laos and Cambodia. The fellows in the bearings shop seemed very interested in our ridiculous look. We attempted to flatter them by complimenting their bearings, but they would have none of it. They knew their bearings were the best in the world, and no amount of flattery could do any more than beat a dead horse.

Outside of the bearing shop, we ran into a German man, living in Damascus and studying Arabic.

He was quite the gearhead, and we spent the next 40 minutes discussing bicycle engineering and in particular the Speed TR’s SRAM internal planetary transmission.

We had been quite happy with ours, and as it turns out he was in this neighborhood looking to buy a planetary transmission for his own bike.

We bid him farewell, wishing him luck in his search for the perfect planetary transmission, and headed back to the Zaid Al Khabir. At the advice of the front desk, we hauled our bikes up to the lobby, where they would be safer from vandals and rapscallions.

We paused for a moment to admire the front desk’s phone before heading back to the cozy confines of our somewhat crumbling room.

I was suddenly jostled awake by a firm hand on my shoulder. It was the driver of our bus from Amman to Damascus, shaking me. He dared not touch Claudia, sitting next to me, and after I was awake to some degree, he indicated that I should wake her too. In fact, it turned out, men and women were not even technically allowed to sit next to each other on this bus, and we had been inadvertently perpetrating another Gaijin Smash.

Regardless, I woke Claudia, and, in a somewhat addled state, wandered off the bus and out into Syria. It was pitch black, cool and dry outside. I looked at my watch. It was just a little after three in the morning. The bus driver had removed our bags and bikes from the belly of the bus, and they lay on the road in a puddle of streetlight. And with a rev and a squeak of the suspension, the bus was gone.

We were soon approached by a small gang of young men, who emerged from the shadowy alleyways of this highway side in Damascus, shouting about taxis. When we began to show them our bicycles and unfold them, indicating our intention to wheel into town, they began to giggle and switched from selling mode into inquisition mode.

Soon we were in the midst of an uncomfortable conversation, in which lines of communication were fraying and the topics included the war in Iraq, Barak Obama, and Obama’s relative comparison to George Bush. Here, in the middle of the night in Damascus, left on the side of a nondescript highway by a grouchy bus driver, being harassed by random cab drivers, you might think, dear reader, that we were a little on edge.

Drastically the opposite. For one reason or another, we were calm, cool, and collected.  In fact, we were feeling quite positive about being in Syria. We strapped our belongings down, climbed onto the bikes and headed out, calling out our goodbyes as we rode, though the gang of men yelled at us to stay for more parlor talk.

The road on which we traveled had been recently paved in a most absurd way, with giant piles of asphalt in some places, and huge rounded, deliberate looking potholes in others. To make matters worse, many of these obstacles were hiding in the shadows, and occasionally cars would whip by us at startling speeds, careening through the night.

Despite all this, we were in very high spirits, singing as we rode, “She’s a Lady, Oh Oh Oh, She’s a Lady!” and generally feeling good. At a large roundabout, we stopped to ask a man wandering the streets which way into the city center, but he turned out to be either very drunk, or on some other kind of drugs. Luckily, another, also slightly inebriated chap emerged out of the night, and directed us to ride subversively across a bridge toward a cluster of Gothic looking buildings.

And then we were there. It was the center of Damascus, and it was beautiful. Most of the buildings had a very old world imperial look to them, with ornate decorations, and good number of spire-like attachments. The city was also quite clean, and smelled faintly of roasting nuts. It was great to have arrived in such a comfortable and interesting place. Unfortunately, it was now about four in the morning, so we had a few choices to make. In the end, we decided that we might was well take this one all the way to Brooklyn and just stay up all night.

So we headed over to a nearby 24-hour hookah and tea café, parked our bikes outside, and to the great chagrin of all involved headed in.

“This is definitely a place where women are not normally allowed,” Claudia mentioned as we all sat down. It was true, the clientele were all men, sitting at little square felt tables, smoking hookah, playing cards and drinking little cups of sweet tea. The staff was all smiles, as were our fellow clientele, who seemed quite interested and amused by the foreigners who came out of the night on folding bicycles.

I left Scott and Claudia there to head out in search of an ATM. I found a few of them, but none appeared to support my American MasterCard. So I returned to the café empty handed. By that point, it had been ascertained that the staff was willing to accept Jordanian Dinars, so knowing that we could pay our bill, we simply relaxed into our seats, dealt the whist, and let the morning work its way around.

In Syria they use mostly a local “Arabic” system of numbers, which is coincidentally actually the Indian system of numbers, while the ones they use in India (and the U.S.) are Arabic numerals. Regardless, we needed to learn to read the new style of numbers, so Claudia, as our West Asia Cultural Liaison, insisted that we keep track of the whist in Indian numerals.

Amidst the multilingual calculus, a young man at the neighboring table leaned over and began chatting with Scott.  Clean shaven but firm, he introduced himself as Hosam.  As his friends chuckled over the smoke of hookah and the slapping of playing cards, Hosam introduced himself as a friend in the unfamiliar city of Damascus.  Son of a local sign maker, and employee of the Yellow Pages, this enterprising chap plied the market for advertising and promotion.  Exchanging phone numbers with Scott, he leaned back into his chair and carried on with his cronies, periodically bouncing his watchful eye back to our table.

As we folded up a game of three-person whist, another fellow came over to our table to take a look at my deck of M&Ms branded playing cards. He seemed to approve. We were soon to discover that Syria was perhaps the only country on the trip thus far where popular Mars products like Snickers and M&Ms were hard to find. We decided to take the opportunity to ask him if he knew of a cheap hotel around here. In fact he did, and since the sun was now beginning to spill over Damascus, we decided to take him up on the recommendation.

We paid our bill, which, in spite of the high exchange rate between the Syrian Pound and the Jordanian Dinar, was still quite affordable. Back on the cycles, we found the city to be even more beautiful in the daylight than it had been at night. It was so much cleaner than the cities in  Jordan had been, and the buildings were a delightful mix of the very new and very old. This should have come as no surprise, since Damascus was in fact the oldest city we would visit on the entire trip, having been continually occupied since about 2000 BCE.

Before riding too far from the 24-hour cafe, we were stopped by a group of Iranian tourists. They were mostly women, dressed all in black, toting fancy DSLRs and video cameras.

They were especially interested in Claudia, though being Persian language speakers, her Arabic did little to help us communicate with them. We were soon to learn that Syria is just packed with Iranian tourists since most of the Shia Muslim pilgrimage sites are to be found in Syria.

We continued to wheel on, ostensibly looking for the hotel, but mostly just loving Damascus.

Eventually, with a little help from a few pedestrians, we found the Hotel Ziad Al Kabir. The place turned out to be a Sudanese flophouse of sorts. It was nestled on the third floor of a very old building, mostly full of tailor shops and printers.

The hotel consisted of a central lobby for reception and prayer, followed by  a long, high ceilinged hall, lined with cracked wood and sanded glass doors, leading into similarly high ceilinged and crumbling rooms, outfitted with ratty steel framed beds cradling thin aging mattresses.

A small kitchen emitted the tantalizing smell of caramelizing onions and Sudanese spices. Our fellow lodgers were mostly from Sudan, and milled around the premises in flowing robes, and tending to their magnificent mustaches. The owners were all smiles and spoke bits and pieces of English.

Perhaps it was an increased romanticism induced by the lack of sleep, but we instantly fell in love with the place, especially Claudia. They claimed a fixed rate of $4.00 per person, and by then we had fallen in love with the delightfully grimy vibe of the place. So we booked a few nights.

We headed to the rooms, and flopped down onto the beds, trusting they would be clean enough to prevent any skin infections, and pondered napping.

In the end, however, with the sun shining and Damascus calling, we decided we had better head out on wheels.

Breakfast would be key. It had been some time since we had eaten anything. Luckily the city seemed full of delicious looking food. We ended up stopping at a flatbread joint, where one could select from a variety of pizza-esque flatbreads.

We were still in need of an ATM that would work with our foreign cards, but the fellow here too, seemed happy to accept Jordanian Dinars, albeit at a somewhat slanted rate. The flatbread, which might be best compared to Turkish “pide” was delightful, and the plastic chairs outside the place, were just operational enough to provide us with a place to sit and eat.  In search of a refreshing diet cola for the team, Scott headed out on a mission while we waited for the oven to warm.  In the process, he found himself in the thick of a pilgrimage troop, all haggling on the street for Chinese made garments and houseware goods.

One man even posed for a photo with his Polaroid 600 SE.  A true devotee: to the camera, to the mustache, and no doubt to the pilgramage.

So with food in our stomachs, we headed out, continuing to wheel, passing giant 1970s-looking brutalist Islamic architecture and thousand-year-old stone bath houses.

Suddenly we found ourselves in a giant outdoor used goods market, where all kinds of bizarre products were for sale.

We dismounted to walk through the area, investigating everything from old appliances, watches, and books, to wired telephones and other 1980s technologies.

Outside the market, we finally found an ATM (probably our 7^th or 8^th attempt) that accepted our foreign MasterCards. Now we had some Syrian pounds in our pockets and my goodness were they beautiful.

From there, we wheeled on, continuing to soak in this delightful town, riding past fountains and mosques, down palm tree lined streets, and impressive government buildings. We stopped for a snack at one of the many Arabic sweet shops, where we were able to load up a plate with baklava and other similarly honey-and-nut-based pastries for only a couple of dollars.

Our next goal would be to repair Scott’s Sri Lankan sandals again. The fellows in Amman had done a decent job, but the rigors of hiking through Petra had managed to tear the new stitches out. We headed into the “old city” part of Damascus to find a shoe repair shop.

The old city of Damascus is quite the hectic place, with plenty of traffic whipping around with little regard for lanes and general protocol. The streets become narrow, and pedestrian traffic intensifies. Meanwhile, the concentration of little shops selling all kinds of amazing foods and goods spikes, as does the number of people burning things, cooking in the street, yelling, making noise, carrying swords, welding in public and generally getting Syrious.

While we were wandering around, we were approached by a local chap, with a quite enviable mustache, who offered to help us get our bearings in this new and complex neighborhood. He even offered also to help us haggle with a shoe repair man to get Scott’s sandals fixed.

For the price of about $1.00, we got a full repair to both sandals, with very thick white thread, going over the ripped seams multiple times. From there, the same chap who had helped us before began insisting that we wander with him into a giant covered market, which he assured us was unmissable.  We wandered for a while inside, but finding it too crowded to safely wheel, we explained to him that we would need to revisit the spot on foot in order to properly experience it. He thanked us for letting him guide us around, and we thanked him for his kind help, bidding fond farewells. Syrian people were proving to be absolutely sweet as pie.

From there we proceeded to get hopelessly lost on the tiny and interwoven streets of Damascus’s old city. It was truly a glorious wheel. We must have passed by hundreds of structures which were over a thousand years old, many of which were covered with intricate tiling or hammered bronze accents.

Mosques, bathhouses, shops, homes… they were all so delightfully intricate and unique, yet somehow all of a cohesive overall style. Damascus was such an esthetically pleasing and intellectually tantalizing town.

Another thing that we were noticing was the pharmacy signs. Rather than the standard western move of the cross, or the mortar and pestle with “Rx” on it,  the pharmacists use this fantastic serpent looking into a goblet.

The cars in Damascus were also incredible. The streets were filled with the full spectrum, from brand new BMW SUVs to Ladas, to 1950s retro sedans, to cars that seemed to be frankensteined together from pieces of 2 or 3 different original machines.

The drivers were generally friendly, yielding space to the cycles, and due to the sheer number of cars on the roads, the speed, in the city at least, was generally slow. It was amazing traffic to be part of.

We continued to wheel, back through the covered market, which this time had cooled just enough to allow the cautious wheeler to make it through at slow speeds. It was about then that we realized it was high time to eat again.

We ended up selecting a rather posh Syrian Colonial style restaurant, tucked into an old building. The food was incredible, and not too expensive, at least by the standards of what we’d been paying in Jordan. We dug heartily into a giant fatush, an array of pastes and yoghurts, and some egg-roll-esque cylinders, filled with an oily and salty Syrian cheese blend.

Back on the streets, we kept wheeling, calling waypoints from time to time to investigate all kinds of interesting items that were for sale or attached to the surfaces all around us.

Not far outside the city, we stopped at a bike shop to buy Claudia a new bike bell. Hers had broken at some point during our transit from Amman. The new one we got her was a fantastic Chinese bell, with a deep rich tone, and amazing packaging.

Now armed with a new loud bell, we wheeled on, past hundreds of pictures of the Syrian president posed in all kinds of situations: as soldier, fighter pilot, statesman, or generally keeping it real with the heads of Iran and Lebanon.

We had been going for a while now, but the sun was still high it the sky. Was it time for a nap? Perhaps, but AsiaWheeling generally forsakes midday napping for midday coffee drinking. So we headed out in search of coffee. When we stopped to ask a fellow wheeler where we might find a cup, he said he knew a good place, and asked us to follow him there.

So we did, wheeling behind him through increasingly tiny alleyways, and eventually to the door of what turned out to be his own shop. The shop consisted of a small central room, with a couch, two chairs, a table with three telephones on it, and a glass cupboard full of examples of the types of hammered pots and pans, which it appeared he sold wholesale. The other room of the turned out to be a kitchen, when his wife burst out of it, with the first pot of coffee.

We were to be his guests, it seemed. He asked his wife to get started on the second pot of coffee, and, while we dug into the first, began to converse with us in Arabic. Claudia did a fantastic job of playing translator. The coffee was glorious: thick and black, just barely sweet, with cardamom pods floating in it. The man’s wife was also quite friendly, though she was asked to stay in the kitchen most of the time and was not invited to participate in the group photo.  A shame indeed, as she may well have been the least awkward character in the snap.

After spending what we felt was a respectable amount of time chatting and drinking pots of coffee with this man, we climbed back on the bikes and headed onto the road once again, riding past a giant street of watermelon sellers, which led us far from the old city out to the newer housing developments.

We eventually had wheeled out into the semi-agricultural suburban lands that surround Damascus. Many of these suburban Syrians seemed to have pretty large plots of land on which they grew fruits and vegetables, which we found quite impressive.

Many of the suburbs of Damascus are positioned in the foothills of the Ante-Lebanon mountains, which flank the city. So it was into these foothills that we rode, stopping after a particularly intense climb to try some of that amazing Syrian ice cream, which our dear Mr. Fu had so often raved about.

The ice cream was indeed fantastic, as was the graffiti on the buildings around where it was sold. Fueled by coffee and ice cream, we headed deeper into the foothills, calling a waypoint at this Islamic cemetery.

Up and up we went, higher into the Ante-Lebanese mountains. Soon the city of Damascus spilled out beneath us, and the sun began to sink low.

At this point, Scott decided to head back to the Hotel, but Claudia and I decided to keep wheeling on in search of a sunset view of the city.

We headed up a somewhat crumbling and rather empty side street. We were making very good progress getting up the mountain, and were just about to approach the perfect viewing spot, when a group of three Syrian military men began yelling, and running towards us. It appears we had accidentally taken the access road to a Syrian military base. In fact, we learned from the soldiers, the entire top of this hill was a base, so all spots that might have a view of the city were actually off-limits.

Fair enough, we thought, and wheeled back down the mountain to meet up with Scott.

Despite having slept on a ratty old pad on the browning linoleum floor of our room at the Sea View Hotel, I awoke quite rested and to find Scott and Claudia already awake and in the hotel’s lobby accessing the free wireless Internet, about which our energetic friend at the hotel cautioned us to always consult him, for it was protected by a password that changes all the time.

“Today the password is ‘123abc,’” he explained, which fell in line with all the wireless passwords that we’d encountered in the Middle East. Network security is apparently not of primary concern here.

We unlocked the cycles and dragged them out from where they had been parked underneath the stairs, hopped on, and headed out in search of breakfast, which we ended up finding in the same restaurant we had visited our first morning in Jordan. We decided that in all our excitement over the standard Middle Eastern pastes, salads, and flatbread meal, we may have missed out on some lurking delicacies. We couldn’t skip the hummus, but in addition, this time, we got a plate of lamb and potatoes in a central Uyghur-tasting tomato sauce, a plate of pilaf and lamb with a kind of cheesy, salty sauce, some kebabs, and few other lurker delicacies.

It was splendid, and as we were finishing, the owner of the place came by our table to chat with us in English and hear what brought us to Amman. He seemed puzzled but pleased by our response and explanation of the adventure. From there we headed out in search of more coffee, which we found in abundance at a nearby coffee stand. We made fast friends with the fellows who owned it, and hung around the place drinking a few cups, doing general coffee shtick, and posing for photos with our new coffee-slinging buddies, who had, for the latter cups, begun to refuse payment.

From there we headed off in search of a place to sit down and work on our pitiful backlog of correspondence for you, dear reader. And we found an amazing place. It was a coffee and hookah joint, situated in an ancient building, nestled in a tree and vine filled cul-de-sac. And they advertised Internet on a fantastically faded sign. Unlike the sign, however, the Internet was sorely out of service, with, the owners of the place assured us, no hope of repair.

Despite the lack of Internet, we barreled head long in to the giant pile of correspondence yet to relate, making great progress, halting all too soon when our laptop batteries died with no available outlets in sight.

The Middle East was proving a very hard place to get things done. So we drowned our sorrows in games of whist, cups of sweet tea, and hookah smoke, and left to head back toward the bus station in very high spirits.

With some help from a few locals, we finally found the way to our bus departure spot, which turned out to be actually a few blocks diagonally away from where our dear energetic friend at the hotel had informed us it would be. When we got there, it was beginning to get dark, and the crazed energy of those just about to board an international bus was palpable in the dry desert air.

We stood there as night fell around us and looked up at the bus. The bus was nice, shiny and adorned with plenty of LED lights and signs advertising the glorious constellation of amenities to be found inside. I’ll go ahead and say it was one of the nicest of the trip, in fact, which puts it up there with some truly luxurious Thai buses. Scott collected the entire team’s passports and headed into a kind of administrative building to get our tickets registered to our passport numbers. Meanwhile I worked to load our stuff into the belly of the beast. Claudia headed out to find us some food to eat on the bus.

With all the things loaded, and with the helper boy who had mostly sat back and watched me position the bikes heartily tipped,  I sat down on a piece of busted concrete and leaned against the side of the bus company’s administrative building and began to play the uke. No sooner had I strummed a few chords than I was approached by a number of gentlemen and a few boys, who were very interested in conversing with me despite their lack of English skills. The crowd consisted of a few bus officials, including our driver,  a smattering of general street children, and one fellow passenger wearing the Gulf-style dish dash.

It was thus that I began a great circular dance of cultural missteps and miscommunications. By the time Claudia arrived back from the restaurant, grinning and laden with falafel wraps, I was attempting to repair a terrible blunder that had indicated to the group that Claudia was both my sister and my wife. Meanwhile, I was operating a parallel and similarly dismal conversation with our bus driver about the America-Iraq war and our policies in Afghanistan. As you see, things were not going well in either conversation. The dish dashed fellow was shaking his head, frowning, and explaining in bits of English and bits of Arabic, that what I had done was frowned upon and would be a crime in the Arab world. The bus driver meanwhile was fuming and pacing.

Claudia’s arrival was none too soon, for she was quickly able to sort out my inadvertent admission of incest, which resulted in a great amount of belly laughing and back slapping with the dish dash wearing fellow who, realizing he had misunderstood me, was now quite thrilled at the experience. In the midst of the laughter, the bus driver  threw his hands in the air in disgust and disappeared, grumbling angrily. He was no fan of America or Americans, as the Syrian fellow next to me tried to explained, apologetically. I had, of course, lacked any of the delicate linguistic skills to express my own views on the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and had been only able to express that I was not myself a soldier, which had involved a lot of dangerous pantomime, and possibly offensive messages.

“That guy really doesn’t like you,” Claudia commented “I hope he’s not riding on our bus.”

“He’s actually the driver,” I replied.

“Really?! Oh no.” Claudia sounded genuinely disturbed.

“What have we been learning about these ‘oh no’ statements?” I replied, feeling none too excited about climbing on the bus.

It left at 8:30 and was headed all the way to Damascus, and, as such, was probably an overnight bus, though our investigations into arrival time had all yielded “she’ll-get-there-when-she-gets-there”-esque statements. So we ate our falafel, which had come with some free salads, when the Egyptian owners of the shop realized Claudia had studied in their home country.  I have to admit, I had a bit of the heebee-jeebees at this point. The interaction I’d had with the driver was the first of all our time in the Middle East that had exhibited even a mild bit of anti-American sentiment.

Considering some of recent history, it had me unsettled. Tonight we were headed into Syria, and Syria was, at least in my own twisted perceptions, one of the most hostile places we would visit. What would it be like? Would we be welcome? Our great helmsman, David Campbell, had assured us that we would be welcomed there, so I continued to attempt to relax and take things as they come.

Then we were suddenly at the border. We all climbed off and filed into a giant hall. The entire rest of our bus was populated by Middle Easterners,  and the Middle Easterners were ruthlessly efficient in their rush to get through customs. By the time we had even identified which line was ours, many of them had already gotten stamped and were on their way back to the bus. We lingered in what we thought was our line, and watched as all the people from our bus climbed back on, and the engine started.

Then I was up to the window. The fellow took a few looks at me, frowning behind his mustache ,and then asked me in a kind of a sneer: “What happened on the 16^th of July?” It was still June. So I stuttered an incoherent babble of words ending in “16^th of July? … I’m sorry?”  Then the fellow coughed out a bit of laughter, twitched his mustache around like a bunnies whiskers, and stamped my passport.

Scott and Claudia got through with even less hassle. Soon the driver began running out after us, scolding us for taking so long in line. We apologized, and climbed on the bus. The bus drove for a few meters past what was to be the first of hundreds of portraits of the Syrian President.

Inside of the Syrian passport hall, we were shown directly to the diplomatic line, where we were very politely and courteously admitted into Syria by a slick-haired fellow, sporting the exact same well-trimmed mustache as the Syrian president.

He stamped our passports with the official Syrian entry, which proudly explains that “When staying for more than 15 days, he must register with branch of indication.” Women apparently did not travel much, or were of little consequence here.

Happy to be back on the bus and safely into Syria, I fell promptly into a deep sleep.

We woke up that morning and headed downstairs to the lobby of our scummy hotel in Wadi Musa, Jordon. It was a place by the name of The Valantine Inn. Rough place. Despite the scummy nature of the joint, we had slept decently. That is at least after the machine gun fire ended. The celebratory shooting had continued until perhaps 1:00 or 2:00 am, but died off after that, allowing us some reasonable hours of slumber.

Meanwhile in the lobby, a couple of the guests were engaged in a noisy argument with the proprietor. It seemed the in-house breakfast is advertised at one price, scrawled in Magic Marker on the wall, but only if booked in advance. These poor travelers had inadvertently sat down to a breakfast that turned out to be double what was marked on the wall, and now were claiming false advertising.

The osmotic pressure of the travelers’ stress was intense, so we headed out to where we’d locked our bikes to an air-conditioning unit, and down into the city. It was the first time we had seen the place in the light of day. It was an interesting looking town, spread out over a section of rolling hills and valleys. It was not a big place, and very few of the buildings were over a few stories.  In the distance, we could see the complex immensity of the geologic formation into which Petra is carved. It’s a kind of bulbous rocky maze, full of spires and crevasses, all in the shadow of a great mesa.

We had been researching how to best explore Petra the night before, since sleeping was initially not an option, due to all the gunfire. Our research had been a disappointing story of expensive rates and restrictive rules. Wheeling, it seemed, was not allowed at all in the park. To make matters worse, we would also be charged at least $40.00 per person to enter, plus be forced into working with the monopolistic bus companies and water vendors therein. How were we to choose freedom?

That was a question too large for pondering on empty stomachs, so we climbed on the cycles and began the slippery slope downhill past the core of the tourist zone into what we hoped would be more of “the people’s” city. We selected a roadside restaurant for breakfast. We ordered some hummus with meat sauce, cucumber yoghurt,  a plate of fries, “special rise,” and an onion and tomato salad. This was all to accompany the central dish, which they most accurately dubbed “chicken from the machine.” These rotisserie chickens were to become a staple of our travel in the Middle East.

We drank the coffee and did “Chicken from the Machine” B-horror-movie shtick until our food arrived.  The food was good, and after haggling a bit over some dubious fees that had been added to our bill, I paid the man, and we hopped back on the cycles. We wheeled on past this tethered horse, and began to explore.

We stopped when a man wandered out of his house to flag us down. He asked us where we were from, and whether he could take one of the Dahons for a quick spin. We were more than happy to indulge him. He then invited us to come into his house for tea. We had just eaten and caffeinated ourselves, and were all set for wheeling, so we politely declined his offer, heading off in search of the Wadi Musa that was for “the people”, not just tourists.

We found ourselves on a hilltop, in the parking lot of a cinder block government building . We were staring out over the city and into the tangled rock that made up Petra beyond. Just then, the call to prayer was sounded, and the city began to fill with the voices of one hundred imams, all singing at once, in different keys. The cacophony became a bittersweet, dissonant symphony of rising and falling prayers, all carried up to us on the dry desert wind.  It was magical.

That was when it occurred to us. The way to choose freedom was to not go to Petra… at least not through the main entrance. We would ride out on a road that we could see from this hilltop, which skirted  around the park. From there we would be able to park the cycles and head in on foot. We’d see what we could see, experience the geology, and see whether or not we got in trouble with the authorities. It was an attractive plan: cheap, exciting, and proactive.

So off we went, tearing downhill, across Wadi Musa and back onto the main road toward Petra. We soared right past the turn-off to the main gate, heading back uphill and into the rocks. Eventually, we found the perfect turn-off and parked the cycles there, eventually folding them up, and locking them in a great pile, tucked behind a rock, and barely visible from the road.

And off we headed, into the desert.

Some call Petra an archeological site, but people also definitely still lived out here. Some of them we could even see, crouched in homes dug out of the rock, napping in the midday heat. Others we knew of only by what they had left behind. Even significantly far from the road, the rocks were strewn with water bottles and the bones of dead sheep.  Many, many sheep had been killed and eaten out here.

Off we went, deeper and deeper into the site. The farther we went, the more intense the carvings became. Soon the homes were not just holes in the rock face, but full on caverns with windows, cupboards and the like. Also, the farther we got in, the less occupied the place became.

As we drew farther from the road, the local population diminished. After a while, we had not seen anyone for a few kilometers. That was when Scott began to feel sick. As you many have already guessed, dear reader, this was not the best place to fall ill. But it was also not the worst. Scott needed to drink some water and rest. He needed to get out of the sun and into somewhere cool.

Luckily, there were plenty of options, and we had brought two liters of water each. So we continued up a set of stairs that had been carved into the rock, through a natural stone arch, and scrambled up to a kind of penthouse carved into an outcropping, perched, unsettlingly skull-like, atop a nearby cliff.  We half walked, half slid down the gravelly entryway and into the space.  It was a shocking 15 to 20 degrees cooler inside. We crawled in and Scott pulled himself up against a stone wall; he was soon snoring.

Claudia and I spent the next hour and a half wandering deeper into the archeological site, scrambling over worn stone walkways carved into the rock, and exploring the living spaces and remnants of what must have been a very interesting city.

We could see the places where the steps that had been carved into the stone would have connected to a bridge across a crevasse. The bridges were, of course, long gone, so we needed to find ways to skirt them and scramble over these obstacles.

After we felt like we’d gone far enough in the blazing sun, we turned around and made our way back to find Scott still snoozing. We ran over to collect all our stores of water and returned to the cave. As we entered, my dear friend began to stir, soon rising, looking much refreshed. After we all spent some time sitting and drinking water, we headed back to the bikes, which were as we had left them, just out of sight on the side of the road.

Back on the cycles, we pulled onto the road. We paused for a moment at the shoulder, though, discussing the best plan of action. We could see the next town over, perched on a mesa overlooking Petra.  After some discussion, we decided the pull of wheeling it was too strong to ignore.

So we began to ride now, through the heat of the midday desert, along the side of a cliff, slowly climbing up  toward the mesa. The longer we rode, the more spectacular the view became.

Soon we reached the nearby hamlet. It was certainly a slightly more down home town than Wadi Musa had been. It too, however, seemed to be mostly fueled, in one way or another, by its proximity to this tourist Mecca.

We continued to wheel slowly into this town, rolling down the street, and attracting plenty of stares from the locals. All around us children ran around with few clothes, goats munched garbage from dumpsters, and old men and women looked on from patches of shade with mild looks of disgust.

Near the end of the town’s main (and only) street, we passed a handful of men, all struggling to clean a couple of camels. The cleaning process, it seemed, was producing a fair amount of camel hair, which now was piled in frothing wads in the street.

At the end of the road, we found ourselves facing a protected back entrance to Petra. We paused for a moment to look out over the delightful geology, and the clusters of parked police vehicles parked by the entrance.

Then we turned around and rode back out of the city. Before we had completely made our way out, though, we decided to stop at a large trinkets shop to buy some cool drinks from their humming, and rather beaten up Coca-Cola branded fridge.

We struggled the last bit of the way up and out of the city, and then relaxed into a few kilometers of luscious downhill riding. Whipping along toward Wadi Musa, we rode with a savage upward stretching cliff to our left and the immensity of Petra spilling beneath to our right.

Back in town, we pulled over at a roadside café, and ordered some drinks and hookah.

We spent a while relaxing from the intensity of wheel and the hike, as Claudia did her best to explain Islamic women’s dress to us.

Refueled slightly, we decided to wheel the rest of the way into town and find food. While we were pausing at what was now becoming our favorite water vendor, the van driver from our exceedingly mediocre hotel rolled up. He asked us in English what we were doing, and we explained the story of our day and that we were looking for a restaurant. He told us of a certain restaurant that his friend ran, and where we might get a discount if we mentioned his name.

As he drove off, it occurred to us that the restaurant he mentioned was in fact the same tourist joint we had visited the night before, with that strange kid. So we decided to wheel on, moving intuitively.

Eventually, we found a good looking joint, and immediately pulled up to one of the outside tables and plopped down. We ordered a feast. It was the usual suspects: hummus, flatbread, babaganouj, yoghurt with garlic, fresh chopped tomatoes and onions,  and fowl.

Just as we were about to dig in, our van driver friend rolled by. He seemed a bit taken aback by the fact that we had not honored his offer. He made some awkward remarks from the driver’s seat of his van, and we attempted meekly to explain ourselves. Eventually he just drove off, and we turned our focus back to eating.

When the bill came, we paid and got back on the bikes.  As we were heading back, Scott spotted a barber and decided to walk in for a little trim. We did our best to haggle, but the fellow was insistent on charging an arm and a leg. So we moved on to the next place. This fellow wanted only an arm and a bit of an ear so we left Scott there, to go under the razor, while Claudia and I rode back to the hotel to off-gas.

Scott returned while Claudia was in the shower and I was shaving. I strolled over wrapped in a towel, and opened the room door to find this guy staring back at me.

The Extremes of Experience Indeed.

We awoke the next morning in Amman, Jordon and promptly hopped on the cycles. We parked our Dahons down the block at the same outdoor coffee place that we had discovered the morning before, now more properly ordering unsweetened coffee, which is in Arabic “Kahuah Sadah.”

We sat down on a low-lying wall near a lower story alley, and began to drink our coffee. A group of fellows who were working below us to move some furniture and rugs around waved up to us, asking us to come down and interact. Scott obliged them, and soon the interaction evolved into a kind of comedic photo shoot. Here are the results.

We climbed back onto the road and started wheeling. We struck out in the opposite direction than we had the previous day.

We had another meeting, this time with a Finnish friend of Claudia’s. We met her in a large touristy market, which we discovered was one of the few places that was still operational, as it was run by Christians, of which there are many in Amman. It was Friday again, you see, and many of the Muslim-owned businesses had halted operation in observance of the sabbath.

We ate street food at the market: more hummus and pita, and falafel, and some shawarma wraps.

We spent the rest of the morning wandering around town with Claudia’s friend and learning about her unending frustrations with the administrative and bureaucratic hassles of trying to comply with the ridged requirements of the western powers that be. It turns out that in the face of no Jordanian ethical controls on studies, western researchers were required to jump through all manner of hoops to prove the ethical nature of their work. This is, in principal, good. But if it keeps people from getting any work done at all, are they not throwing the baby out with the bathwater? In the end it looked like our new friend would be spending the summer in Amman, but would not be able to do any research due to foot dragging.

As we were bidding goodbye, she taught us our new favorite Finn joke:

Q: “How do you tell a social Finn?”

A: “She’s staring at your shoes.”

We continued to crack up all the way back down the hill toward the city center. We loaded up on water, and after a quick session of furious work on correspondence for you, dear reader, we checked out and climbed onto the cycles. It seemed wise to put something more in our stomachs before heading to the bus station.

So we wheeled our fully loaded cycles over to a nearby falafel house and indulged in some of the house specialty and greasy cardboard containers of deep fried cauliflower. Outside the stand, a man peddled fan blades.

The meal was scrumptious in a most oily way, and feeling refueled, if somewhat laden with grease, we began to lean into the long climb out of the crater of Amman, back up to the bus station.

It was a long wheel up and plenty of climbing for three fully loaded wheelers. We stopped many times to make sure that we were on the correct route, to drink water, and to rest. Claudia was quite generous with her Arabic skills, stopping repeatedly to chat with large crowds of men outside of cafes, most of which she returned from with reports of thorough, though somewhat subdued, sexual harassment. Sometimes the sexual harassment would become slightly less subdued, and Claudia would find herself batting away stray hands. “This would be so much worse if I were not traveling with you two,” Claudia explained in exasperation. Scott and I continued to be flabbergasted at the behavior of Jordanian men, uncertain of how we could best protect her, and in total awe of Claudia’s ability to endure it.

At the bus station, we were soon surrounded by fellows offering to drive us to our next destination for unreasonable prices. Finally, we were able to find the fellow who ran the bus. He took one look at the cycles, and began a drawn out and tedious bargaining process. Finally, we were able to agree to a price to get us and all our stuff onto the bus. There was no luggage compartment, so we would need to pile our things onto the seats.

Once we finally got on, the driver pulled a last ditch attempt to get Scott and me to cram into the seat-and-a-half -sized space between our cycles and our luggage. Here again, Claudia came to the rescue. She was already hard at work making friends with our fellow passengers, who turned out to all be recent graduates of the Amman police academy.  She asked them how much they had paid for their tickets, and once we found out how drastically overcharged we had been, we found a more solid basis for an argument that our things might take up the back seats of the bus, with us occupying the following row.

In the face of our knowledge, the fellow began to exhibit what we would find to be a common Jordanian trait: rather than make any attempt to repair bridges or laugh it off (which would be the Indian, Indonesian, Cambodian, or Vietnamese style), the man simply became cold as ice, and refused to treat us with an ounce of respect for the rest of the journey.

This was fine, however, for he was at the other end of the bus, driving, and we were in the back with a whole crowd of new police friends. They asked about my ukulele, and I took it out, beginning to play. The driver of the bus promptly turned the radio onto a local pop channel and cranked the volume up.  Fair enough. I put the uke away.

With that the bus pulled out of the station and began its long crawl across the desert toward Wadi Musa. The bus ride was about four hours, enough to get comfortable, but not so much that we began to tire of the journey.

Meanwhile the desert landscape was beautiful in a completely unique way, compared to the desert we had seen in Oman and the UAE. It was a place of large flat lands, mesas, and south-western-U.S.-style rock formations. As we drove on, we continued to chat with our newly christened police officer friends.  It turns out they were all coming back to Wadi Musa for a kind of graduation party.

They had been proudly showing us their newly printed diplomas,which they all proudly carried with them. Unfortunately, when we stopped to stretch our legs, one of them left his diploma somewhere in the middle of the desert rest stop. He began to dissolve into madness, searching the bus wildly. We attempted be be helpful by moving our stuff around as well, engaging with him in the doomed mission to manifest the lost diploma. Then, just as quickly as the madness had set in, it passed. The fellow became relaxed and cheerful once again, and we continued the ride as if nothing had happened.

When we finally arrived in town, the sun was just setting. Our new friend who had lost the diploma got on his mobile phone. He knew of a good cheap hotel, he explained, and soon a driver from the hotel had arrived in a van to take our stuff. We ended up loading our larger bags into the van, and wheeling up behind him.

The party was already well under way in this city. People were driving around in over stuffed cars, and all around us we could hear the unnerving sound of automatic weapons fire. It seems the new grads were firing their machine guns into the air in celebration.

This was a hilly place, some of the steepest wheeling of the entire trip to date, in fact. The roads were also polished to an unnatural slickness, perhaps by sand, or wind, I have no idea. But I found my back tire slipping and loosing traction on the steepest sections. Once we reached the hotel, we were somewhat disappointed to find it to be your classic backpacker-type joint. The clientele were almost exclusively foreigners, and the interior of the place was so cluttered with a mixture of advertisements for touring services to the surrounding sites,  old faded posters of the most beautiful places in Jordon, or large advertisements for Petra brand beer. Needless to say, we were already a little wary upon entrance.

The initial asking price was monumental by AsiaWheeling’s and most Asian backpacker’s standards. Further inspection of the room confirmed that this was no Chinese business hotel either. The place was grimy to be sure, and expensive. But it was late, there was gunfire all around us, and we were hungry.

So we started bargaining. It was the most drawn out, energy intensive and multifaceted bit of bargaining we had yet experienced. In the hotel’s corner there were two chaps, one good cop, friend-of-the-owner-just-trying-to-help-us-out-type guy and then the grumpy and predatory owner. One was a short portly smiley fellow. The other was a rail thin chap, with sunken eyes and a jagged scowl.  His teeth, blackened and disintegrating with decay, sat like sharp stones in his small mouth. In our corner, there was one Arabic speaking blond girl and two weathered fellows in Panama hats and mustaches. It was going to be a close one.

We dithered back and forth, frowning, stroking our facial hair, making clicking noises, and generally play-acting. Finally we settle on a price that was still quite high, but doable. We asked to have a moment to chat, and after a quiet word outside returned in to seal the deal. During the chat, however, it seemed that the price that had been offered had been either repealed, or never was valid to begin with.

So in frustration we continued the assault. Finally, when the two fellows continued to refuse to return to the aforementioned price, we began to prepare, as much as we did not want to, to leave. Just as were turning our backs, the wiry, scowly front desk attendant called out to Claudia in Arabic, “Where did you learn Arabic?”

“Egypt,” she replied.

They then began to ask her a series of questions aimed at confirming that indeed she had lived in Egypt. And Claudia seemed to pass this test.

“I am an Egyptian,” he replied, Gitanes cigarette bouncing in his mouth, and stuck out his hand.  He revealed a tattoo proving that he was a Coptic Christian, hailing from a particularly poor neighborhood of Cairo.

Finally it was over. We paid the man; relieved to be on to the next task, we headed up to our room and threw down our stuff.

From there, we climbed back on the cycles. Barely able to keep from sliding on the steep, slick pavement, we ventured downhill toward the city center to find a little dinner and an ATM. The ATM was easy, and while Claudia was “WarBucks-ing” as we had come to irreverently refer to the replenishing of the steady trickle of money which is AsiaWheeling’s lifeblood, a child appeared from the dark street. He pulled up on his bicycle, and hopped off, flicking down his kickstand with a sickening rusty squeak. He was very interested in our Speed Series Dahons, and we decided to let him take a little ride. He did not seem 100% trustworthy, though, so I headed off next to him on Claudia’s bike to accompany him for the wheel.

While I was wheeling next to this kid, making sure that he didn’t disappear into the desert night with the Speed TR, another round of nearby machine gun fire sprang up. It was a startling kind of noise. I knew it was all in good fun, but something about mixing the sounds of war with those of celebration, was making getting used to this particular piece of culture harder than usual. By the time I returned back from my little wheel with this kid, Scott and Claudia had already asked a fellow for directions to a restaurant recommendation.

We followed his advice, and found ourselves wheeling not more than a block up the street to an pricey tourist-filled joint.  We sat down, taking our seats next to a bunch of British 17-year-olds, who were traveling in Jordon after graduating from high school. This place was way too touristy for AsiaWheeling… but we were hungry and tired, so we capitulated. We gave our order to a somewhat grumpy and overly costumed waiter, who spoke perfect English.

Soon the young kid who had ridden our bicycle showed up and sat down with us. He immediately ordered a Coke and began to chat us up. He took out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter, and began smoking. Then he made a faux attempt to light my mustache on fire with his lighter. Pulling his hand back at the last minute and blowing out the flame, he proceeded to roll back into his chair consumed with laughter; we looked on confused.

The more time we spent with him, the more uncomfortable I became. Something was off about this guy. We couldn’t quite put our fingers on it. His English was okay, but not quite good enough to communicate consistently. He was likely not really dangerous in any way. He certainly wanted to get some free Cokes out of the relationship. But there was a strange performance aspect to the way he interacted with us that was really unsettling. Picking up his mobile phone, he fabricated conversations of business deals in an attempt to impress us.  In the end we hustled through our  mix-plates of falafel and pastes, and headed out the door.

Back on the cycles, we decided to indulge in a quick spot of night wheeling, letting the physical activity calm our somewhat frazzled minds. Wadi Musa… it was quite a place. It was the gateway to the splendorous world of Petra, an ancient city carved into the desert rocks. But had the beauty of its surroundings somehow turned its people into tourism-fueled predators?

When Scott asked if I could write a post on Islamic Finance for the blog, I nodded with enthusiasm. To be honest I am a relative newcomer to this topic and a non-Muslim, and though while supremely curious I feel I run the risk of offending others on a subject that can be sensitive. Nevertheless, here we are.

The first thing that caught my attention about Islamic finance is its recent origins. Although religious scripts governing Sharia law have been around since Prophet Mohamed’s time, Islamic finance only emerged after the Second World War. It didn’t emerge as a result of new, groundbreaking economic principles, but as a response to a series of clashes between western and Muslim nations, which led to a rise in pan-Islamism.

Among the consequences of this movement was a change in the ways of commerce among Muslims. As Gulf nations withdrew petrodollars they held in the West and began dumping them in their own backyard, cities like Dubai and Kuwait emerged as hubs for the practice and display of Muslim financial piety. By the 1970s, Islamic scholars, economists, and intellectuals were busy studying and interpreting passages of the Quran for the creation of a framework for Islamic finance.

Theological Underpinnings

There are several factors that appear to make modern day Islamic finance different from conventional finance, the most important of which is the prohibition of interest. Wikipedia amply lists all these traits.

Al-Baqarah 2:275 Those who consume interest cannot stand [on the Day of Resurrection] except as one stands who is being beaten by Satan into insanity. That is because they say, “Trade is [just] like interest.” But Allah has permitted trade and has forbidden interest. So whoever has received an admonition from his Lord and desists may have what is past, and his affair rests with Allah . But whoever returns to [dealing in interest or usury] – those are the companions of the Fire; they will abide eternally therein.

But this prohibition isn’t unique to Islam. The Old Testament also regards the charging of interest as immoral. Exodus and Deuteronomy specifically regard lending to the poor as a sin.

Biblical Parallels

Exodus 22:25 - You shall not give him your silver at interest, nor your food for gain.

Deuteronomy 23:19 - Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother; usury of money, usury of victuals, usury of any thing that is lent upon usury

Leviticus 25:37 - Thou shalt not give him thy money upon usury, nor lend him thy victuals for increase

It was only during the European Renaissance when Protestant reformer John Calvin changed the status quo. He argued that not all rules in the Old Testament set out for Jews (who were permitted to lend to gentiles) were applicable to Christians and that one must not interpret these passages in a literal manner. The bible should simply serve as a guide. But Calvin’s real concern was the exploitation of the poor through high interest rates. In Calvin’s letter to Oekolampadius, he writes that he is unwilling to condemn usury so long as it is practiced with equity and charity. Whoever borrows should make at least as much, if not more, than the amount borrowed, meaning that as long as one is fair and reasonable, charging interest should be allowed.

Calvin’s words were such a blow to the Church that interest became legalized across Europe. This was a major turning point in history. It is interesting that Calvin’s view, which forms a basis for modern day capitalism and bank lending, was effectively reversed by Islamic scholars in the 1970s. Is this to say that Muslims, who did business like others in corporate America up until the 1970s, were all of a sudden subject to the new rules of Islamic finance? Yes, in a sense. But there is a twist to it all.

According to Sharia scholars, a guaranteed rate of return on an interest rate is prohibited because the lender and borrower typically bear an unequal level of risk. For example, Sharia scholars prohibit the issuer of a bond to default on an interest payment and then go bankrupt, because those at the bottom of the pecking order virtually have no claim to their monies. Therefore much of Islamic finance is about creating a mechanism that reaps the benefits of bank lending with the appearance of profit sharing (Mudharabah).

Financing Structures

Consider a car loan. If I were to take out a loan in the UK, the bank lends me money and I repay the loan at a predetermined interest rate. Should I become unfit to service the loan, the bank revindicates (repossesses) the car, collects what is owed, and refunds the remainder (if any). If I were to go to an Islamic bank, the bank buys the car, and then sells it to me at a premium, also to be repaid at predetermined intervals (Murabahah). Although I end up paying the same amount under both scenarios, Islamic scholars believe that the latter scenario is only fair because should I default, the bank simply revindicates the car with no further claim on me. In the earlier scenario, the bank may further pursue me for any remaining principal if the repossession doesn’t provide enough. Thus Islamic banks do charge for the time value of money.

Another popular Islamic investment product is a sale/lease bond, aka Sukuk. Suppose I am a property developer and wish to build an apartment complex. I would sell a piece of real estate to a special purpose vehicle (SPV), which raises the funds by selling share certificates. The SPV leases the asset back to the issuer (me), thereby collecting principal plus interest and passes the proceeds back to the sukuk holders in the form of rent. At the end of the lease, the SPV sells or gives the property back to the issuer.

Other types of Islamic financial transactions exist. But to me the above examples are enough to suggest that Islamic finance is nothing more than smoke and mirrors. Islamic finance uses complicated structures to achieve the same goal as conventional finance, but with added cost and decreased transparency. At the end of the day, profit and interest by any other name is still profit and interest. It is hard to imagine that this was the Prophet Mohamed’s objective.

Interest in Indonesia

Having grown up in the world’s most populous Muslim nation, I want to share my observations on Islamic finance in this part of the world. In my opinion Indonesia sees Islamic finance like a dot in the horizon. I can assure you that the majority of business done in Indonesia is definitely not Sharia compliant. Even more fundamentally, more than half the population, which lives in poverty, has probably never even heard of Islamic finance.

The problem with Islamic finance is that it has no global standardization. It emerged in the 1970s in the Middle East, which explains its varying level of demand in different Muslim countries. And as Islamic finance continues to emerge in different parts of the world, it faces the danger of generating greater differences and inconsistencies. A recent Bloomberg article calling for certification among Muslim scholars is further testament to this problem.

Don’t the Saudis own shares in Citi? Are wealthy Indonesian Muslims putting their money into Singapore or their own Sharia banks?  As the market continues to develop, time will tell how market priorities interplay with religious doctrine.

The following day, we spent most of our time working on correspondence for you, dear reader. We lounged around Sid’s place, hacking away on our computers, and doing a fair amount of schtick revolving around The Pixies’ tune “Hey.”

When Sid arrived home from work, he recommended that we visit a certain Arabic restaurant near the Dubai Creek that he was particularly fond of. Since we had hitherto not discovered anything that Sid was fond of that did not also strike our fancy, we agreed.

It was no surprise that the restaurant was incredible. And we feasted into the night on pastes, falafel, lentil soup, and a plate of mixed grilled meats. We then opened up the laptop and spent a few hours doing trivia, while we smoked Hookah.

It was Jackson’s last night with us in the Gulf, and all concerned were quite sad to see him go. As we sipped on minty lime drinks and chatted about financial depravities, I felt my heart grow heavy. It was so nice to have Jackson along on the trip. He added such a delightful spice to our daily lives.

The next morning Claudia and I awoke to find the apartment empty, and Jackson and Scott downstairs hard at work packing up his Speed TR for the journey home. For a moment, glancing down at our watches, we feared that we had overslept Jackson’s departure. So we were relieved when Jackson and Scott came back upstairs. By then, however, it was already well past time for Jackson to catch a cab. It was a hurried but heartfelt goodbye.

And then there were three.

We figured: what better way to mourn the departure of the illustrious Jackson than to go on a wheel? So we did exactly that. Claudia, Scott, and I unfolded the remaining three Dahons and headed out into Dubai.

Outside Sid’s apartment, in his general neighborhood, there were wide pedestrian ways, which made for easy wheeling. But soon they began to dissolve, and we were forced onto the road itself.

We then realized this was to be no wheel for beginners. The traffic was fast, and none too used to having cycles on the roads. All the sidewalks appeared to be only partially constructed so, Mario-Carting (as AsiaWheeling refers to cycling on the sidewalks) was not an option. So we rode fast, amidst the traffic, and trusted in our ability to signal our intent and the quality of our Vietnamese motorcycle helmets.

We were heading toward the main street of Dubai, an eight-lane, skyscraper-lined behemoth, by the name of Sheikh Zayed Road. It was an easy landmark, since it loomed, gigantic, over all the city. Once we finally made it there, the traffic was almost too intense for wheeling. We stuck to the side streets and only entered the main torrent when it was absolutely necessary.

Eventually we decided our next waypoint should be the ocean, so we hoisted the cycles up and scrambled over a large pedestrian crossover, plunking them down on the other side,  and wheeling on, now perpendicular to the Sheikh Zayed Road. We were heading toward a giant, fluttering, UAE flag that we knew was near the seaside.

Part way down the gravelly drive, we stopped to fill up our tires with the Speed TR’s in-seat pumps. When I opened mine up, a small stream of sand fell out of it. I was worried for a moment that the sand may have gone deeper as well, ruining the pump, but thankfully that was not the case.

Tires well pressurized once again, we wheeled on, into a very expatriate neighborhood. We were beginning to be able to smell the sea, so we knew we were close. We left the residential zone, and crossed a large empty gravel lot toward a huge Iranian hospital. Outside of the Iranian hospital, we were pulling an uber-lichtenstein when Claudia’s pedal fell off into the street. There were some moments of confusion and anxiety as we dashed into traffic to retrieve it before some Lamborghini or Land Rover crushed it. Unlike our Speed TRs, Claudia’s Speed D7 did not have detachable pedals, hers instead folded up against the cycle, so the pedal falling off was something to be alarmed about.

Luckily, the repair required no tools, just some careful manipulation of springs and bending and snapping back into place of plastic bits. The Iranians walking in and out of the hospital paused, forming a small crowd around us, quietly looking on as we performed bike surgery.

Then we were wheeling again. Soon we came upon a large beach, where a paved path led out onto a kind of jetty.

We decided to wheel out to the end of the jetty and take in the view, which was magnificent. There we met a group of young men whom we decided not to let ride the cycles. Normally on AsiaWheeling we are more than happy to indulge locals who are interested in tasting the raw freedom of the Speed TR themselves. For one reason or another, these chaps gave us a bad feeling, and we decided to decline. So we snapped a quick picture and split.

From there we followed the directions of this sign:

And we wheeled the one or two kilometer bike path that runs along the beach. It was a nice gesture by the Emerate of Dubai toward wheelers, but was far too short to provide anything other than a mild whetting of one’s appetite for cycling.

Claudia’s stomach had begun to hurt during the ride, so we decided to call the wheel. From there, we headed back toward Sid’s place, using the giant towering Burj Khalifa as a navigational tool. The sun was dipping low, and traffic was picking up as we pulled onto a great bridge arching over the Sheikh Zayed Road. The ride was high voltage but beautiful. From up on the bridge, we could see all the architecture of Dubai laid out around us, colored gold by the setting sun. It was exhilarating, dampened only slightly by the exhaust I was breathing at the time.

Back at Sid’s we began packing up our things for tomorrow’s flight to Jordon. The Gulf had been a magical place, in no small part due to great people, like Sid and Jackson, who helped us to make it so magical.

That evening, Sid opened a bottle of wine (quite the luxury here in the Gulf), and we lounged around the kitchen discussing Life, The Universe, and AsiaWheeling. That evening, Sid treated us to a meal at the restaurant of the hotel downstairs. It was a nightly theme restaurant, with tonight’s theme being Africa. For one reason or another, AsiaWheeling was most interested in the extensive salad bar at the place. It had been quite some time since, I guess, we’d eaten raw greens, and we reveled in the opportunity.

Before retiring for the night, we managed to do a little work on the web, though not before encountering a few blocked sites to our surprise with the following warning with a woman wearing a Batoola:

We crawled into bed that evening, not knowing quite what the rest of the Middle East would hold, but if the Gulf was any indication, it would be incredible.