By the time I reached the small town of Palmyra, way out in the middle of the Syrian desert, I had become somewhat accustomed to the ways of the locals.
"Tell him we traveled 9,000 km from Japan to see these very tombs," I hollered at our guide with exaggerated agitation, "and we aren't budging until he lets us in." In Syria, I had learned, you don't delicately edge into disagreement through insinuation, as you might in Japan. You dive in head first.
By this, the fifth day of our Syrian Tourism Ministry-sponsored press tour of the nation's uniformly stunning historical sites, we had already negotiated several such "disagreements," usually with success. Our guide and I had developed a kind of good cop-bad cop routine; I, oddly enough, was the bad cop. On this particular occasion, our adversary was a middle-aged man who had wandered out of his Bedouin- style tent, past his goats and his dust- covered motorbike, to tell us he wouldn't let us into the tombs we sought to see because we didn't have permission from the appropriate government authority.