mogreby
Old-Salt

Over the last few months I have dipped into several threads here, mostly with anecdotes concerning time I spent in Beirut in the early 1980's. It was suggested that I might like to expand a little and start a dedicated thread. This is it. I expect it will interest some more than others and will result in positive, negative and at times hilarious criticism.
Some years ago I wrote some notes of my time in Beirut and the trip that led me there. This write up is from those notes with additions that pop up in my mind as I write it. Spelling of Arabic words written in English are as close as I can get them.
I was a volunteer in a school for deaf children on the outskirts of Beirut from late 1981 to mid 1985, most of what I'm going to write concerns the time I was living and working in Beirut but first I'll explain how I ended up there.
I'd been in the police from 1978 to the end of 1980 and my friend Tim had spent a year in Jordan with Project Trust. We planned to hitch to Jordan and then go on to Bangalore in India where he had family connections.
April 15 1981: we were dropped off at a Layby on the London Road, Ipswich to hitch to London. I had £100 in traveller's cheques drawn on Grindlays Bank. That evening we caught the Magic Bus to Athens via Eastern Europe. We spent four days in Athens then tried to hitch to Thessalonica. Got 30km in one day so decided the take local busses which took another day but was cheap. We spent a night near the railway station in an abandoned wagon. It had seemed OK the night before but smelt badly of pee the next morning. From Thessalonica we took a local bus to the Greek-Turkish border. Entering Turkey we got an OTO STOP (hitching) stamp in the passports. No vehicles with passengers were crossing so we joined a coachload of tourists from the Greek side who had walked across unchaperoned and so we got on a Turkish bus to Istanbul for free. Passports were checked before the coach left but our hitching stamps went unnoticed.
Istanbul was a real eye opener for a 20 year old, the grand bazaar, the mosques. Walked round a corner and saw two bears dancing in the street, it would be shocking now but times were different. The film Midnight Express having only recently been released was much on my mind, even so, a visit to the Pudding Club seemed obligatory even though I only had a glass of tea. We spent four days there and then got the express train to Ankara and another train through Adana to the border. Having been on these trains several times we bought some yoghurt and biscuits to take but these ran out after 24 hours so off to the dining car. The train had been stopping and shunting back and for a lot since setting off so the fact that we were stopped on a hillside was unexceptional.
The carriage door was locked but it was a simple matter to go out of the side door and enter the next carriage and continue to the dining car. Sitting there the train set off back the way we'd come faster than ever before which wasn't promising. The meal consumed we walked back to the end of the car and the door opened, suddenly there was no more train there. I had my passport and traveller's cheques but my rucksack was in the part of the train that wasn't there any more. Tim was in the same position.
A guard came along and sign languaged that the train had been split where the doors were locked and the bit we were on was going back to Ankara whilst our bags were on the way to the border. He seemed unconcerned at our predicament and wandered off, shortly afterwards the train stopped and the guard came back to let us know this was the place to get off. It was the middle of nowhere but with a single track road crossing the rail line. Having nothing to lose we got off and the train disappeared into the distance. Then a battered car came along the road and stopped, apparently it was a taxi and knew where we wanted to go, no idea how the driver knew but he did. His taxi was also full of people whom he made get out and we got in.
Driving along I saw the bit of the train I wanted still on the hillside but the driver refused to stop and let us clamber up the hill, he carried on and dropped us at a railway station. He could have Standing on the platform wondering how to ask if the train on a hill “somewhere over there” would be arriving here any time soon we were approached by a Turkish policeman. He didn't speak much English and we didn't speak much Turkish but on learning that I had been a Bobby he took us under his wing and let us wait in his office. He fed us hard boiled eggs – I'd never eaten one before (don't ask) and lots of glasses of tea and awful Turkish fags but they made a change from roll ups. Everyone wishing to cross the border to Syria had to get clearance from him and this had to be stamped on their onward ticket. We didn't have tickets yet but he solved this for us by calling in a couple of Syrians and confiscating their tickets which he handed to us. This was a dilemma – clearly it was theft/receiving stolen goods but we didn't want to piss him off either so, to my shame, we kept the tickets.
He told us Turkish police jokes which consist entirely of how quickly they can draw, fire and re-holster their pistols. So, a Turkish policeman is hanging from the branch of a tree but can let go, draw, fire and re-holster so fast he can grab the same branch again. Another standing in sunlight can draw, fire, re-holster before his shadow has moved. Etc. eventually after 4-5 hours the train came in and our bags were there, the sense of relief was immense. We said goodbye to our new friend and got the train to Aleppo in north Syria.
There we had a quick look round before making our way south, out of the city and started hitching again, a couple of local lorries stopped and picked us up. During the day we went through Hama and Homs and arrived in Damascus in the evening. We got a room in the Grand Hotel which was huge but not grand, we had a massive room with a bathroom in the middle of it made private by wood and pebble glass walls. Damascus was stunning after breakfast the next day. We had black tea with flat bread and sour cream, sliced tomatoes, cucumber and the like. We went to the bazaar and walked down a Street Called Straight with lots of bullet holes in the roof. I was offered £1,000 for my passport but declined – so far the whole trip apart from the Magic Bus ticket had cost £20-25 so £1,000 was a huge amount but naive as I undoubtedly was I suspected I might not actually see £1,000. we went to visit the Grand Mosque and to see the Hejaz Railway station which was beautiful and to a museum with part of the Koran carved into a single grain of rice.
We met a deaf man whom Tim already knew and went to the cinema to see Anthony Quinn in Omar Mukhtar. The cinema was brand new and the screen appeared to have been put at the top of the slope and the seats turned round to face it. This was fine for us as we were in the second row but as the rows went back they also went down instead of up so how people further back saw the film I don't know. There was uproar and wild support whenever the Italians were losing to the Libyans, a bit like a Saturday matinee at the flea pit when I'd been younger when the goodies got cheered and the baddies booed.
From Damascus we got a service taxi, this meant buying individual seats in a shared Mercedes car, there were also American cars doing this run but the majority of Near and Middle East taxis were Mercedes. Traffic was heavy going out of the city so our driver took to the pavement which was very wide at the point but in getting up the kerb he ripped the exhaust off. At the Syrian-Jordanian border the car had to drive over an inspection pit to ensure no contraband was hidden underneath we went off to get our passports stamped out of Syria and when we got back to the car the inspector passed it and we set off across no man's land to the Jordanian side. We were quickly through the formalities and set off sough into Jordan. We stopped at Ramtha where the taxi driver wanted to get the exhaust repaired. The mechanic looked at the torn off bit and then seemed to make a new piece without apparently taking any measurements. It sounded fine and stayed on and only took half an hour in total.
We got out of the taxi a Suweilah and got another taxi to Salt where Tim had spent his year. At Salt we were fed and lodged in return for labour in a school for deaf children, there was plenty of construction being done so I was able to pick up the rudiments of cement work, plumbing and glazing. Welding was and remains a total mystery to me. To continue to the gulf and India we had to cross Saudi so went to the embassy in Amman for transit visas. We didn't mention hitch hiking and they forgot to ask for our vehicle registration so visas were issued and we set off to the Saudi border beyond Zarqa (which had a black basalt castle used by Laurence in WW1.
At the border the guard watched us as we walked up and asked what we wanted? We said we wanted to go to the gulf by crossing Saudi. He laughed and said we'd need a transit visa which we couldn't have as we had no vehicle. We showed him what we had and he had to let us in. We went through the only baggage search of the entire trip and had to empty our rucksacks to show the Saudis we weren't smuggling anything. At this point we didn't have a lift at that point so had to wait at the border for several days begging lifts from passing lorry drivers. There were plenty of Brits delivering to Saudi including one caught in a sort of Groundhog Day whereby he got to the border with a load of hospital air filters which were in sealed boxes to keep them sterile. The Saudi border guards opened them all and they were then rejected by the hospital so he had to go round again. Another was carrying sections of steel pipe which you could look through with a torch, they all had to be unloaded and looked through.
We got lifts with a couple of Brit drivers, it took two to three days driving across the desert basically following the tap line, we slept on the lorry tilts, saw a rain flurry and one tree. Other then that it was uneventful. We arrived in Sharjah in the UAE one evening around mid May and found the address of a couple Tim knew from his time in Jordan. They fed us, gave us a bad and ensured that we washed the clothes we'd crossed Saudi in several times to get the grime out.
The daytime temperatures were in the high 90's and humidity was very high too. I'd never been in a climate like it, this was the first time I'd been outside Europe and even then I'd only had a week in Germany at Bunde with the Royal Anglians as a Cadet. I figured that the climate was only going to get hotter if we went to India so I told Tim I didn't want to go further. He took it well and didn't complain too much, to be honest I don't think he minded not going further but maybe that was just what I wanted to think.
We decided to head back the Salt but this time the Saudis wouldn't give us a visa so we had to fly. Back at Salt we continued labouring for our keep with the odd day trip to the Jordan valley, Wadi Wala or the desert castles. We had a room each and three meals a day as well as 15 Dinar per month which I seem to recall was between £15-£20. in July we decided to go to Cyprus for a week mainly because we could afford the flight. On the way we had a 24 hour stopover in Beirut and were lodged in a school for deaf children situated just outside Beirut on the Damascus highway. Beirut was calm at the time but there were sandbagged positions at many junctions and four Syrian tanks hull down, facing east Beirut, just outside the school. While we were there the director asked me what I was going to do when I left Jordan. I said I hadn't thought about it and he asked if I'd come to Beirut and volunteer there? I said I wanted to think about it but inside I was thrilled at the idea. Beirut was exotic and exciting compared to Salt and like most 20 year olds the thought of a civil war on my doorstep was a bonus rather than a worry.
We carried on to Cyprus and had a day in Limassol before catching a bus to the mountains where we slept out as we had sleeping bags. Back in Jordan I was counting down the days till we left in September to hitch back. In the beginning this was the reverse of the outward trip except that we arrived in Aleppo in the evening and planned to stay in the railway station sleeping on benches before catching the train to Turkey the next morning. Within 15 minutes a van load of soldiers turned up and 'arrested' us for vagrancy and took us to a boarding house where we paid 10 Syrian Pounds – about £1 each for a night without breakfast but with plenty of fleas. Once across the border we hitched rides on lorries to Istanbul and there waited 3-4 days at a lorry camp for a ride out to Europe. I was lucky and got a ride that took me all the way to Harwich. At first I was made to walk through borders with my rucksack but later on the driver let me stay in the cab as we crossed borders. I arrived in the UK in late September Tim went to uni. and I flew back to Beirut in November 1981.
Some years ago I wrote some notes of my time in Beirut and the trip that led me there. This write up is from those notes with additions that pop up in my mind as I write it. Spelling of Arabic words written in English are as close as I can get them.
I was a volunteer in a school for deaf children on the outskirts of Beirut from late 1981 to mid 1985, most of what I'm going to write concerns the time I was living and working in Beirut but first I'll explain how I ended up there.
I'd been in the police from 1978 to the end of 1980 and my friend Tim had spent a year in Jordan with Project Trust. We planned to hitch to Jordan and then go on to Bangalore in India where he had family connections.
April 15 1981: we were dropped off at a Layby on the London Road, Ipswich to hitch to London. I had £100 in traveller's cheques drawn on Grindlays Bank. That evening we caught the Magic Bus to Athens via Eastern Europe. We spent four days in Athens then tried to hitch to Thessalonica. Got 30km in one day so decided the take local busses which took another day but was cheap. We spent a night near the railway station in an abandoned wagon. It had seemed OK the night before but smelt badly of pee the next morning. From Thessalonica we took a local bus to the Greek-Turkish border. Entering Turkey we got an OTO STOP (hitching) stamp in the passports. No vehicles with passengers were crossing so we joined a coachload of tourists from the Greek side who had walked across unchaperoned and so we got on a Turkish bus to Istanbul for free. Passports were checked before the coach left but our hitching stamps went unnoticed.
Istanbul was a real eye opener for a 20 year old, the grand bazaar, the mosques. Walked round a corner and saw two bears dancing in the street, it would be shocking now but times were different. The film Midnight Express having only recently been released was much on my mind, even so, a visit to the Pudding Club seemed obligatory even though I only had a glass of tea. We spent four days there and then got the express train to Ankara and another train through Adana to the border. Having been on these trains several times we bought some yoghurt and biscuits to take but these ran out after 24 hours so off to the dining car. The train had been stopping and shunting back and for a lot since setting off so the fact that we were stopped on a hillside was unexceptional.
The carriage door was locked but it was a simple matter to go out of the side door and enter the next carriage and continue to the dining car. Sitting there the train set off back the way we'd come faster than ever before which wasn't promising. The meal consumed we walked back to the end of the car and the door opened, suddenly there was no more train there. I had my passport and traveller's cheques but my rucksack was in the part of the train that wasn't there any more. Tim was in the same position.
A guard came along and sign languaged that the train had been split where the doors were locked and the bit we were on was going back to Ankara whilst our bags were on the way to the border. He seemed unconcerned at our predicament and wandered off, shortly afterwards the train stopped and the guard came back to let us know this was the place to get off. It was the middle of nowhere but with a single track road crossing the rail line. Having nothing to lose we got off and the train disappeared into the distance. Then a battered car came along the road and stopped, apparently it was a taxi and knew where we wanted to go, no idea how the driver knew but he did. His taxi was also full of people whom he made get out and we got in.
Driving along I saw the bit of the train I wanted still on the hillside but the driver refused to stop and let us clamber up the hill, he carried on and dropped us at a railway station. He could have Standing on the platform wondering how to ask if the train on a hill “somewhere over there” would be arriving here any time soon we were approached by a Turkish policeman. He didn't speak much English and we didn't speak much Turkish but on learning that I had been a Bobby he took us under his wing and let us wait in his office. He fed us hard boiled eggs – I'd never eaten one before (don't ask) and lots of glasses of tea and awful Turkish fags but they made a change from roll ups. Everyone wishing to cross the border to Syria had to get clearance from him and this had to be stamped on their onward ticket. We didn't have tickets yet but he solved this for us by calling in a couple of Syrians and confiscating their tickets which he handed to us. This was a dilemma – clearly it was theft/receiving stolen goods but we didn't want to piss him off either so, to my shame, we kept the tickets.
He told us Turkish police jokes which consist entirely of how quickly they can draw, fire and re-holster their pistols. So, a Turkish policeman is hanging from the branch of a tree but can let go, draw, fire and re-holster so fast he can grab the same branch again. Another standing in sunlight can draw, fire, re-holster before his shadow has moved. Etc. eventually after 4-5 hours the train came in and our bags were there, the sense of relief was immense. We said goodbye to our new friend and got the train to Aleppo in north Syria.
There we had a quick look round before making our way south, out of the city and started hitching again, a couple of local lorries stopped and picked us up. During the day we went through Hama and Homs and arrived in Damascus in the evening. We got a room in the Grand Hotel which was huge but not grand, we had a massive room with a bathroom in the middle of it made private by wood and pebble glass walls. Damascus was stunning after breakfast the next day. We had black tea with flat bread and sour cream, sliced tomatoes, cucumber and the like. We went to the bazaar and walked down a Street Called Straight with lots of bullet holes in the roof. I was offered £1,000 for my passport but declined – so far the whole trip apart from the Magic Bus ticket had cost £20-25 so £1,000 was a huge amount but naive as I undoubtedly was I suspected I might not actually see £1,000. we went to visit the Grand Mosque and to see the Hejaz Railway station which was beautiful and to a museum with part of the Koran carved into a single grain of rice.
We met a deaf man whom Tim already knew and went to the cinema to see Anthony Quinn in Omar Mukhtar. The cinema was brand new and the screen appeared to have been put at the top of the slope and the seats turned round to face it. This was fine for us as we were in the second row but as the rows went back they also went down instead of up so how people further back saw the film I don't know. There was uproar and wild support whenever the Italians were losing to the Libyans, a bit like a Saturday matinee at the flea pit when I'd been younger when the goodies got cheered and the baddies booed.
From Damascus we got a service taxi, this meant buying individual seats in a shared Mercedes car, there were also American cars doing this run but the majority of Near and Middle East taxis were Mercedes. Traffic was heavy going out of the city so our driver took to the pavement which was very wide at the point but in getting up the kerb he ripped the exhaust off. At the Syrian-Jordanian border the car had to drive over an inspection pit to ensure no contraband was hidden underneath we went off to get our passports stamped out of Syria and when we got back to the car the inspector passed it and we set off across no man's land to the Jordanian side. We were quickly through the formalities and set off sough into Jordan. We stopped at Ramtha where the taxi driver wanted to get the exhaust repaired. The mechanic looked at the torn off bit and then seemed to make a new piece without apparently taking any measurements. It sounded fine and stayed on and only took half an hour in total.
We got out of the taxi a Suweilah and got another taxi to Salt where Tim had spent his year. At Salt we were fed and lodged in return for labour in a school for deaf children, there was plenty of construction being done so I was able to pick up the rudiments of cement work, plumbing and glazing. Welding was and remains a total mystery to me. To continue to the gulf and India we had to cross Saudi so went to the embassy in Amman for transit visas. We didn't mention hitch hiking and they forgot to ask for our vehicle registration so visas were issued and we set off to the Saudi border beyond Zarqa (which had a black basalt castle used by Laurence in WW1.
At the border the guard watched us as we walked up and asked what we wanted? We said we wanted to go to the gulf by crossing Saudi. He laughed and said we'd need a transit visa which we couldn't have as we had no vehicle. We showed him what we had and he had to let us in. We went through the only baggage search of the entire trip and had to empty our rucksacks to show the Saudis we weren't smuggling anything. At this point we didn't have a lift at that point so had to wait at the border for several days begging lifts from passing lorry drivers. There were plenty of Brits delivering to Saudi including one caught in a sort of Groundhog Day whereby he got to the border with a load of hospital air filters which were in sealed boxes to keep them sterile. The Saudi border guards opened them all and they were then rejected by the hospital so he had to go round again. Another was carrying sections of steel pipe which you could look through with a torch, they all had to be unloaded and looked through.
We got lifts with a couple of Brit drivers, it took two to three days driving across the desert basically following the tap line, we slept on the lorry tilts, saw a rain flurry and one tree. Other then that it was uneventful. We arrived in Sharjah in the UAE one evening around mid May and found the address of a couple Tim knew from his time in Jordan. They fed us, gave us a bad and ensured that we washed the clothes we'd crossed Saudi in several times to get the grime out.
The daytime temperatures were in the high 90's and humidity was very high too. I'd never been in a climate like it, this was the first time I'd been outside Europe and even then I'd only had a week in Germany at Bunde with the Royal Anglians as a Cadet. I figured that the climate was only going to get hotter if we went to India so I told Tim I didn't want to go further. He took it well and didn't complain too much, to be honest I don't think he minded not going further but maybe that was just what I wanted to think.
We decided to head back the Salt but this time the Saudis wouldn't give us a visa so we had to fly. Back at Salt we continued labouring for our keep with the odd day trip to the Jordan valley, Wadi Wala or the desert castles. We had a room each and three meals a day as well as 15 Dinar per month which I seem to recall was between £15-£20. in July we decided to go to Cyprus for a week mainly because we could afford the flight. On the way we had a 24 hour stopover in Beirut and were lodged in a school for deaf children situated just outside Beirut on the Damascus highway. Beirut was calm at the time but there were sandbagged positions at many junctions and four Syrian tanks hull down, facing east Beirut, just outside the school. While we were there the director asked me what I was going to do when I left Jordan. I said I hadn't thought about it and he asked if I'd come to Beirut and volunteer there? I said I wanted to think about it but inside I was thrilled at the idea. Beirut was exotic and exciting compared to Salt and like most 20 year olds the thought of a civil war on my doorstep was a bonus rather than a worry.
We carried on to Cyprus and had a day in Limassol before catching a bus to the mountains where we slept out as we had sleeping bags. Back in Jordan I was counting down the days till we left in September to hitch back. In the beginning this was the reverse of the outward trip except that we arrived in Aleppo in the evening and planned to stay in the railway station sleeping on benches before catching the train to Turkey the next morning. Within 15 minutes a van load of soldiers turned up and 'arrested' us for vagrancy and took us to a boarding house where we paid 10 Syrian Pounds – about £1 each for a night without breakfast but with plenty of fleas. Once across the border we hitched rides on lorries to Istanbul and there waited 3-4 days at a lorry camp for a ride out to Europe. I was lucky and got a ride that took me all the way to Harwich. At first I was made to walk through borders with my rucksack but later on the driver let me stay in the cab as we crossed borders. I arrived in the UK in late September Tim went to uni. and I flew back to Beirut in November 1981.
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