Damascus to Jerusalem

On Thursday I made the final trek out of Syria and into Israel. It seemed so easy in the Lonely Planet. The buses were at awkward times but there were plenty of shared taxis that would take you all the way from Damascus to Amman from where another shared taxi would drop you at the Allenby Bridge border crossing with the West Bank. I set off at 7am confident of being settled in Jerusalem by mid afternoon.

In fact things were a bit tougher. We set off OK, having done ritually haggled my fare from Damascus to Amman down from £7 to £5, but I hadn't counted on border checks, customs officers, my fellow passengers love of the Duty Free shops (there's one as you leave Syria and another 500m later when you enter Jordan) and the fact that you get dropped in the "wrong" bus station in Amman for your connection to the Allenby Bridge. That would have been fine except that, meanly, I had exactly 5 Jordanian dinars in my pocket, which was going to be the cost of a shared taxi to the border and I didn't want to change any more. Unfortunately I needed 1 dinar more to make the quick hop to the right bus station. I was almost resigned to trudging off to find an ATM - or even walking it, but the temperature was nearly 40C by now and my rucksack was heavy - when a guy in a travel agent's reached in his pocket and gave me a 1 dinar note for the trip. It was a small gesture in once sense - a dinar is about 70p - but at the same time very touching and typical of the hospitality I'd enjoyed all through this trip. I was a bit humbled by my meanness and I'm not sure many travel agents in London would subsidise a Jordanian tourist's shortfall on the Heathrow Express - but maybe I am wrong.

The border crossing itself was a marvel of Arab insouciance mixed with Israeli franticness. At one side of the bridge, a selection of slightly bored Jordanian officials checked your passport, x-rayed luggage (one of the machines was broken, which meant half of it went unscanned I reckon) and pointed you in the direction of a bus that would leave at some time or other. Nothing is signposted, there's a sense of drifting about before everyone realises which bus is leaving and you are on the way. I had imagined the Allenby Bridge would be some sort of noble, sweeping structure crossing into Israel and two of us asked a man if we could walk across. We soon discovered why he laughed so loudly: the bus shuttles you about 5km through hot, scrubby desert until, utterly unnoticed, you cross a tiny two-span concrete bridge - the sort that would go across the A368 - and you are in Israel/Palestine.

Then things get a bit more crazy. The Palestine/Israeli side of things is a mass of people pushing against a well-founded Israeli obsession with security. There's not really a queue, just a mass of people trying to get to the front. First your luggage (and everyone else's) is taken off you and fed into the maw of a couple of huge x-ray machines that emerge on the other side of a big wall. Then you queue up to go through metal detectors and (by the looks of it reserved for foreigners) one of those cool machines that blow air at you to sniff out explosives.

Then come the passport checks. The queues for Palestinians and Israelis move fairly fast but the one for foreigners crawl along as Israeli teenagers on military service ask you what you are doing in Israel and (unspoken) why you didn't come in via Ben Gurion airport like a normal person. Every so often someone is sent off to complete a form and join the queue again from the back. It's noisy, everyone is crowding round the windows and you can't really hear what the officials are asking you. I got through OK. A Peruvian I had sat next to on the bus, who was just behind me in the queue, hadn't appeared two hours later.

After that, there's yet another queue for another passport check and then you find what happened to your luggage: there's a big random pile of bags where the x-ray machines have spat them out and you have to wade in to find yours. I (dumbly) had left my laptop in mine and I just found it in time before someone almost trod on it to get to his suitcase behind.

From then it's straightforward. You take a little minibus through the West Bank (scrubby, desert, saw settlements, didn't see the separation "fence") and very quickly you are in Jerusalem. It was almost 6pm but I had arrived.