Middle East - Anthony Ham [430]
Microbuses to Baniyas (S£65, 45 minutes), Tartus (S£65, one hour), Homs (S£90, two hours) and Hama (S£100, three hours) leave from Beirut Garage, near the train station. From the same station, Izreq runs a daily minibus service (S£500) to Antakya in Turkey. If you call 352 021 it will collect you at your hotel.
Taxi
Taxis charge S£35 for trips within town.
Part of the service taxi station next to the train station is known locally as Beirut Garage ( 353 077), and it’s from here that services run down the coast and across the border into Lebanon. They leave when full for Tripoli (S£450) and Beirut (S£700). If you call 353 077, they may collect you from your hotel.
Train
If you’re travelling to Aleppo, we recommend you take a train rather than the bus, as they’re extremely comfortable and the scenery is stunning, especially for the first 1½ hours from Lattakia. The train station is about 1.5km east of the city centre on Saahat al-Yaman. There are four daily departures for Aleppo: two express services (1st/2nd class S£160/135, 2½ hours) at 6.30am and 5.15pm, and two slow services (S£70/50 in 1st/2nd class, 3½ hours) at 7.20am and 3.40pm.
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AROUND LATTAKIA
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UGARIT
The low-lying ruins at Ugarit (Ras Shamra; adult/student S£150/10; 9am-4pm Nov-May, to 6pm Jun-Oct) are all that remains of a city that was once the most important on the Mediterranean coast. From about the 16th to the 13th century BC, it was a centre for trade with Egypt, Cyprus, Mesopotamia and the rest of Syria. The writing on tablets found here is widely accepted as the earliest-known alphabet, and the tablets are on display in the museums in Lattakia, Aleppo and Damascus, as well as the Louvre in Paris. Today, the masonry left behind shows you the layout of the streets and gives you some vague idea of where the most important buildings were. Come here for the sense of history, not for the visual effect.
Regular microbuses (S£10) make the trip from Lattakia to Ugarit. They leave from a back alley down the side of the big white school on Saahat al-Sheikh Daher.
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QALA’AT SALADIN
Although Qala’at Saladin is less celebrated than Crac des Chevaliers, TE Lawrence was moved to write: ‘It was I think the most sensational thing in castle building I have seen.’ The sensational aspect is largely due to the site – the castle is perched on top of a heavily wooded ridge with precipitous sides dropping away to surrounding ravines. It’s pretty amazing, a fact recognised by Unesco, who inscribed it on their World Heritage list in 2006.
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THE GOLDEN AGE OF UGARIT
Until a worker ploughing a farm near the coast adjacent to Lattakia struck an ancient tomb, the site of Ugarit was unknown. This exciting and important discovery in 1928 led to the excavation of the site the next year by a French team led by Claude FA Schaeffer. What he found was astonishing.
The oldest finds at Ugarit date back to 6000 BC. Findings that date from around 1450 BC to 1200 BC reveal a sophisticated and cosmopolitan metropolis with palaces, temples and libraries with clay tablets bearing inscriptions. These clay tablets, representing a Semitic language – it is still thought by many to be the earliest-known alphabet in the world – became a celebrated finding. The site also revealed vast Mycenaean, Cypriot, Egyptian and Mesopotamian influences in the artefacts, a result of trade both by sea and by land.
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The castle (adult/student S£150/10; 9am-4pm Wed-Mon Nov-Mar, to 6pm Wed-Mon Apr-Oct) is located 24km east of Lattakia and is a very easy half-day trip. Begun by the Byzantines in the 10th century, it was taken over by the Crusaders in the early 12th century and the construction of the castle as you see it today was carried out some time before 1188, the year in which the Crusaders’ building efforts were shown to be in vain. After a siege of only two days, the armies of Saladin breached the walls and the Western knights