Demo site — Arsu Tours is not a real company. Nothing here can be booked. What this is
Seven days · 4 October
Damascus to Aleppo by way of Hama's norias and the colonnade at Apamea. Two nights in a restored courtyard house, a day at a marquetry bench, and the citadel with the archaeologist re-cataloguing it.
A vaulted stone passage with pointed arches in the Aleppo souq. Photo by Ahmad Sofi on Unsplash.
Demo: Illustrative itineraries. The dates, prices and remaining places are invented for the demo.
Damascus
Met at the airport or on the Beirut road, then straight to the courtyard house. An evening walk down Straight Street with nothing to see except the city going home, and dinner where you are staying.
Night: restored courtyard house, Old Damascus
Damascus
In the courtyard early, when the marble is still cool. Then Souq al-Hamidiyya end to end — look up at the roof, where the holes are from French artillery in 1925 — the brass guild, and a long lunch. The afternoon is yours.
Night: restored courtyard house, Old Damascus
Damascus
Damascus gave its name to the cloth. You spend most of the day with a weaver working a hand loom, and you leave with what you made, however uneven. The fee goes to the workshop in full.
Night: restored courtyard house, Old Damascus
Hama
Out of the city mid-morning, up the M5. Afternoon at the norias on the Orontes — up to twenty metres across, wooden, still turning — and the riverside coffeehouses built at their feet, where the groan of the wheel is simply part of the evening.
Night: family-run hotel above the river, Hama
Apamea → Aleppo
Apamea in the morning: a colonnaded main street running close to two kilometres along a ridge, some columns spiral-fluted. It is usually quiet, and your guide will tell you why that quiet is not romantic — the site was looted heavily after 2011. Into Aleppo by late afternoon.
Night: courtyard house, Jdeideh, Aleppo
Aleppo
Up to the citadel early, then Al-Madina Souq — the re-roofed sections while they trade, and the sections still closed, because seeing only the finished parts would be a kind of lie. The afternoon is the marquetry bench: mother-of-pearl inlay, badly cut, entirely yours.
Night: courtyard house, Jdeideh, Aleppo
Aleppo
Breakfast on the roof and a free morning — most people go back for the soap they did not buy. Transfer to the airport, or the road south to Damascus and Beirut if you are travelling overland.
Departure day
This journey cannot be booked — there is no company behind it.
See the enquiry form anyway