Days 106-110: Damascus and Aleppo, Syria

Wander through the streets of Damascus and you could be there at any point in time in the last 3000 years. It's a city that does not belong to any one age- it represents them all. Everywhere you turn you meet a new set of contradictions in time, a juxtaposition of old and new worlds. Syria embraces the new world with one arm, but, with the weight of its history and its Islamic tradition, it pushes it away with the other.

The souks have hardly changed for years, although now women in burqas are shopping for D+G sunglasses to go with their headscarves. Sure, you can even buy lingerie in the souk now (even a cute little bikini top shaped as fluffy, fur-lined lovehearts) but you will still be served exclusively by men.

The blend becomes stranger still when you visit the famous mosques. At the Umayyad mosque, one of Islam's greatest holy sites, you will see a mix of tourists and worshippers, the men in shorts and tshirts, the women covered from head to toe. The place is packed, crowds clamoring, pushing, crushing to get in to see relics such as the head of John the Baptist. I queue to get into one such room, and find myself stuck in the middle of horde trying to force their way through an exit-only door - my first taste of religious fervour. And while the women are forced to cover their bodies, reducing them to mere silhouettes against the polished marble, it's the ladies who are pushing and shoving while the men wait patiently.

I have never understood the role of relics in Islam. It's a religion that forbids any depiction of the prophet yet proudly displays a single whisker from his beard, or the head of John the Baptist (who is a prophet of Islam as well as Christianity). In Aleppo, I discovered a mosque that has a plaster footprint of the prophet, and pilgrims visit from neighbouring countries to wash with and drink water which has touched is surface. And there are plenty of worshippers paying their respects to these ancient relics of major significance, some abasing themselves on the floor and others filming events on their camcorder.

Down the street, I wander into a Shiite mosque, and the rules change again. This is a proper place of worship, not a tourist site, and a crowd is gathering for Friday prayers. In the main prayer room a small circle of men is listening to a firebrand cleric - his continual shouting, pointing and Koran-thumping tells me he isn't preaching peace and love. The group of men around him respond with ritual chant and song at appropriate places, some of them working themselves into a state of near-hysteria and beginning to cry. Others watch on silently, recording the events on their cellphone. Nearby a women's prayer group gets too close, and the cleric's minder moves over and shoves them out of the way. I figure it's time to leave, but lose my way to the exit. The same minder pushes past me, a sharp jab in the back reminding me that clueless non-believers aren't welcome here.

And then on my way back to the hotel, amongst the magnificent mosques, souqs, is the modern Syrian contribution to architecture. The contradictions go on.