Travelling alone in Syria

Travelling alone in Syria is a workable thing and plenty of people do it. The difficulty is not nerve but logistics. Prices are set per car and per room rather than per person, the table is laid for sharing, the evening ends early, and if something goes wrong nobody notices by default. This page takes those differences one at a time. There is a separate page for women travellers and what it covers is not repeated here.

Guide or independent

This is not a moral question but a question of what you are buying. Independent travel works: the visa is issued at the point of entry for most nationalities, city transport runs, and intercity buses give a foreigner no trouble.

What a guide or a local driver sells is not scenery but information. The state of the road that day, which checkpoint backs up at which hour, which crossing is open, which gallery is shut today — none of it is published. Then there is language: somebody who talks at the gate, at the bus yard and to the site guard genuinely speeds things up.

There is a sensible middle: do the cities yourself and the country with a driver. The old cities of Damascus, Aleppo, Hama and Tartus are walked; Krak des Chevaliers, Qasr Ibn Wardan, Palmyra and Saladin’s Castle need a car.

Agreeing terms with a driver

The car is hired by the day and the price attaches to the car. Alone, you pay that whole daily figure; with two people the same money is halved. This is the largest extra cost of travelling by yourself.

Agree before you set off and count out what is included: fuel, the driver’s meals, his accommodation if the trip runs overnight, leaving the city, waiting hours. Every item not discussed appears separately in the evening. Finding a driver through the hotel builds a different chain of responsibility from finding one in the street — if something goes wrong, it is clear who you talk to.

Finding someone to share with

The real way to halve the cost of going alone is to find someone else walking the same route that week. This happens in small family-run hotels: the breakfast table, the courtyard and the front desk all do the job.

Saying tomorrow’s plan out loud when you check in is usually enough. If someone else wants the same place, the car splits in two; if not, nobody has lost anything.

Eating alone

The Syrian table is built for sharing: mezze come to the middle and portions are not sized for one person. Sitting alone you either over-order or under-eat.

Three practical answers. First, cut the number of mezze to two and fill in with bread; telling the waiter you are alone is enough, and a half portion exists in most places. Second, street food and bakeries: there the portion is already for one and the price is low. Third, the coffee house — it is the most natural place to sit alone for a long time and nobody looks at your table.

Evenings

End the day before dark. The reason is not crime but infrastructure: street lighting depends on the power supply and cuts are daily. Finding your way in an unlit street, not seeing a hole in the road, and being unable to flag a taxi are three separate problems and they arrive together.

Take intercity roads in the morning. Checkpoints are more cautious at night, waits get longer, and the road produces unlit vehicles, animals and unmarked works. If a leg cannot be finished before dark, give that leg an extra day.

The habit of checking in

The one real risk of travelling alone is invisibility: if something goes wrong, nobody registers it. The fix is simple and costs nothing once it is a habit.

• One person knows the day’s plan. Where, with whom, back when. It can be someone outside the country.
• The hotel knows too. Tell the desk where you are going before you leave the city, and leave the driver’s name and the plate number.
• Check in once a day. A short message is enough; the absence of one becomes a signal.
• Download the map offline. The position signal drops under the souq vaults.
• Carry the hotel name written in Arabic. Showing it to a taxi driver is faster than describing it.
• Keep medicine and the policy with you. Nobody will notice you are ill; say so early.

Invitations and drawing a line

Travelling alone brings more invitations — tea, a table, “come, let me show you”. The great majority of them are real hospitality and it is the best part of the journey.

Two situations still need separating. First, the person at a ruin or a mosque door who declares himself your guide: he may know his subject, but he will ask for a fee at the end. Ask at the start, and if you do not want it, thank him then and walk on. Second, being walked to a shop: being offered tea and being taken shopping are not the same thing.

Saying no is not rude. A short no, said with a smile and without a reason, is a perfectly legible answer here. If it is pressed, the best way to close the subject is to keep walking.

What going alone gives back

There is another side to it. A traveller on their own gets spoken to more: called to a table, drawn into conversation by shopkeepers, told things a group of six would never hear. Being foreign draws attention in this country, and most of that attention is well meant.

Keep the plan loose. Alone, changing a whole day requires consulting nobody — and in Syria a plan that changes at midday is the rule rather than the exception.