Aleppo's labyrinthine souqs

Aleppo's labyrinthine medieval souq - or rather souqs within a souq - has long been one of our favorites in the Middle East, mainly because it has remained relatively untouched by tourism up until recent years - especially compared to Istanbul's Grand Bazzar and Cairo's Khan el Khalili. It's a place where locals shop for anything from women's underwear to camel meat, as much as backpackers haggle for hookah pipes and harem pants. Great buys include olive soap (buy the soap the locals buy, not the soap packaged for tourists), Syria's famous silk brocades and other textiles, and gutras (men's checked headscarves). These days you'll also find stores and stalls with their eyes on the growing tourist market selling jewellery, carpets, and brass and copperware, and spruikers on corners hustling for sales. But we prefer wandering the back-alleys, where the locals shop for their cheap plastic shoes, spangly fabrics, and children's clothes, offering a far more authentic experience.

Aleppo and our room with a view

Aleppo is Syria's most atmospheric city after Damascus and it's our next favorite destination after the capital, the highlights for us being the medieval souq, the labyrinthine old quarters dotted around the inner-city, and the complex cuisine, arguably the most interesting in the Middle East. The new town with its stylish cafes - currently full of hip young Syrian expat kids home for the summer holidays - is pretty appealing too. We're here to do hotel reviews and a feature on Aleppo's oldest restaurant dynasty, as well as gather content for other stories, so we've been at the Aleppo Sheraton for a few days. While it can't compare in terms of atmosphere to Aleppo's myriad boutique hotels in restored old houses, the hotel's location, slapbang in the centre of Aleppo, mid-way between Al Jdeida and the souqs, is unbeatable. As is the comfort and space of our room, the big desk, and internet access - things that become more important to a writer and photographer on deadline than sleeping under an Ottoman-era ceiling, I'm afraid. Oh, and the views, pictured, are pretty special too.

Abu Shady, the last of Syria's traditional storytellers still tells his tales

One of our many reasons for coming to Syria this time was to interview Abu Shady, the last of the hakawati, or traditional storytellers. We last interviewed him almost two and half years ago when we were here to update our Lonely Planet Syria and Lebanon guidebook - that's the 'current' edition every Western traveller is clutching in their hands here now. (We're not using it ourselves - nor are we using any other guidebook - there's no need obviously after so many trips here, but it's interesting to see how many people have a guidebook *and* a guide - very different to last time when there were far more independent travellers around. Why people need help ordering a meal, I'll never know, but it's something I'm going to ponder in another post.) When we last spoke to Abu Shady he was conscious of his age, depressed that numbers of people attending his performances at Al Nawfara cafe in Damascus' Old City were dwindling, his biggest competition being cinema, TV and the internet, and was grooming his son to take over after he died. Ironically, now his nightly performances are packed (people even phone to book tables) and storytelling is more popular than ever (in line with a resurgence of interest by Syrians in everything old), yet he no longer wants his son to take over. Why? Because the pay is lousy. I guess there's a point artists reach when they're no longer prepared to go hungry (or allow their family to go hungry) for their art. I'll pop up the link to our story soon.

In print and online

Check out some of our latest work In print and online, including a review of Pierre Gagnaire's extravagant restaurant Reflet at the InterContinental Dubai Festival City in the latest issue of Gulf Air's in-flight magazine Gulf Life. You can read the online version of the review here and you can also take a look at our first review of Reflet on Fodor's Hot List if you missed it last year. In the same issue of Gulf Life you'll also find some photos that Terry took of Chef Mohammed Hellal at Damascus' Four Seasons hotel. We also interviewed the Chef two years ago while we were there updating the Syria section of Lonely Planet's Syria and Lebanon guide (we had written the Lebanon section and front matter for the 2004 edition). If you're heading down under to Perth (pictured) in the near future, rip out Walk This Way: Perth and test out my walking tour around Western Australia's capital which features in this month's issue of Connect, the Business Traveler magazine of Carlson-Wagonlit; you can print up the online version here. If you ever get a chance to do it, let me know what you think.

Our latest travel writing: in print and online

Aside from our new Lonely Planet Syria and Lebanon guidebook hitting the shelves, we had a couple of articles appear on the web recently. Check out our "Off the beach in Crete" piece on the NineMSN Travel website. Yes, it is a Greek Island and it is summer, but there is life beyond the beach resorts and this is one island where we strongly believe that getting off the beaten track is more rewarding than staying on the well-trodden sand. Likewise, avoiding the throngs of tourists and thousands of groups that stream through Rome's Vatican Museums each day by doing a private after-hours tour is the only way I'd recommend you visit the museums and Sistine Chapel, having now done it both ways. Terry and I road-tested one of the private tours offered by Viator when we were in Rome a few months ago (as you know, we don't recommend or write about anything we haven't tried ourselves), and this is definitely the way to do it. You can read why I think so in my post for Viator, Why Lara loved her after-hours Vatican tour (sorry, not a very original title, I know), and also here in my own post. A few readers have asked where they can buy our books... well, if you don't have a good travel bookshop near you (or any bookshop for that matter, but travel bookshops are much more fun, aren't they?), you can always buy our guidebooks online from Amazon.com via my Cool Travel Guide Shop where I've compiled our titles. I haven't updated it in a while, so a couple of titles are missing, but I promise to do so soon. You can also go straight to Amazon or other online bookshops, but obviously if you buy a book here I get a little commission. The photo? A young Italian couple kissing among the columns at St. Peters, Rome.

Our Lonely Planet Syria and Lebanon guidebook: the challenges of guidebook research and other considerations

Our research last year for the Syria chapter of our recently released Lonely Planet Syria and Lebanon guidebook required that we visit everything already in the book, along with many more sights that weren't in the guide. And while we loved visiting all of those "out of the way castles and ruins", when making decisions as to what to include and exclude in the manuscript we have to think about how much other readers might enjoy what may appear to be merely a pile of rubble to anyone but the most avid archaeological enthusiast. In some cases, the ruins of a castle may be rather spectacular (like the one pictured) and may well be worth the effort to get to. But most readers, who are staying in Syria for an average of five days, might not want to spend a long day travelling (or indeed several days) to get to the site, especially if the journey involves long waits between buses in the middle of nowhere and perhaps even a spot of hitchhiking to get there.

The other consideration we have is word count. We can't just keep adding sights to books, and therefore adding paragraphs and pages. In fact, for almost every book we ever worked on for Lonely Planet we were required to reduce rather than add new text. So, in order to add a few paragraphs to include some of those off-the-beaten-track places some readers would love us to include, we'd have to remove sights elsewhere. When it comes to making those decisions we have to ask ourselves whether we should cut a popular site that might be visited by thousands of travellers to include an out of the way castle that may get visited by only a few hundred people? And with a country like Syria (and, now, under the current political climate, also Lebanon), we have to give this serious thought. How many people are actually using our book and visiting these places? When we did our six week road trip around Syria we only bumped into around 20 other travellers. We were alone at most major sights.

It would be heavenly to write a book with an endless number of pages and complete freedom to include everything we wanted to. But it would also have to have a fee to match. And that's another interesting consideration. How many publishers are going to pay us to go to all those out-of-the-way sights that might only ever get visited by a few hundred travellers at most? Not Lonely Planet that's for sure. And probably not many other publishers either...

Our Lonely Planet Syria and Lebanon guidebook has hit the shelves!

We've just received our author copies of our recently released Lonely Planet Syria and Lebanon guidebook and I'm rather excited to see it in print as we put a lot of hard work into it. Admittedly, seeing a book for the first time is not as thrilling these days as it once was, especially as we've now written, contributed to and updated around 35 guidebooks. And it's even less exciting when Lonely Planet sends you a few mangled, well-thumbed copies, rather than issues that are hot off the presses and smell freshly printed! The fact that we researched it over a year ago, from April to June 2007, also takes a bit of the edge off it. Just thinking that some of it is already out of date makes me cringe. But such is the nature of publishing - books take forever to get from research through writing to manuscript submission, then through editing and author queries until they finally go to print...

I went online to see if there were any reviews of the book yet but unfortunately all I could find were a few Amazon.com reader reviews which, while attached to this edition, are actually for the last edition. Some were written 8 years ago and so apply to an ancient edition while one 2007 review applied to an edition we wrote that was already 4 years old, so obviously some content was out of date when the reader used it. Interestingly though, we used that edition when we were on the road last year and it was in pretty good shape. The way we research is to methodically check everything in the current book as we're travelling from town to town, retaining anything that's still open and is worthwhile, deleting or downgrading anything that's closed or is not as good as it once was, and then looking for places to replace any deletions. One reader writes of that edition: "It only gives you the most popular sites and then a few it claims are "off-the-beaten-track" but really aren't. It misses some of Syria's best out of the way castles and ruins." What he fails to consider is that we all travel differently. Some of us are more intrepid than others, and what might be a well-trodden sight for one reader might be well and truly "off-the-beaten-track" for other less adventurous travellers. And let's face it, Lonely Planet guides are mainstream books aimed to appeal to a wide cross-section of people. As someone who has been to Syria many times, when I next visit I won't be using a Lonely Planet or any other guidebook. My own well-thumbed and rather ragged version of Ross Burns' Monuments of Syria will be enough to guide me.

Pictured? My co-author/husband Terry at one of those out-of-the-way sights that may not be off-the-beaten-track enough for everyone. The first person who can identify the site gets the most mangled copy of the new guides that Lonely Planet sent me! How's that for incentive?