It was nearing 2 AM and my travel mate and I– two women, obviously tourists, alone in the middle of the night on the empty streets of Damascus– were desperate for a hotel room.

We’d been wandering from full hotel to full hotel for half an hour when we saw a small neon hotel sign in a window—far up in what looked like a residential building. We entered the quiet, litter-strewn stairwell. There was graffiti on the walls. We wondered to each other if the building was abandoned.

As we rounded the corner to the next landing, a hand-printed sign that only read “Hotel” with an arrow urged us to continue up the stairs.

“I don’t know about this,” Sarah said.

“What choice do we have?” I asked her. “Look, let’s give it another flight or two and if we don’t see it, we can get out of here.”

She agreed and we continued up.

After another two flights, we heard voices and strains of music. A light shone from above. We pushed on.

We entered the “hotel”– which looked more like an apartment– out of breath, hunched over from the weight of our large backpacks. Three Syrian men sat in the living room, drinking tea and smoking cigarettes, the TV blaring classical Arabic music.

My Arabic speaking companion was too out of breath to speak, so I gave it a try in English. “Is there a room?” I wheezed.

The men looked at each other.

“Sit, sit!” one insisted.

I didn’t want a chair. I wanted a bed. Dawn was just hours away. I wanted to sleep. “No, no, we need a room,” I said.

They looked at each other again, spoke rapidly in Arabic. I glanced at Sarah. She shrugged that she didn’t understand them.

Finally, they turned to us. “Yes, we have a room,” one of the men said. He offered it to us for 10 dollars and suggested we see it.

“That’s OK,” I said. “We’ll take it.”

The small room had a sink, three single beds, and an armoire. We flung our packs down on one bed and didn’t bother with changing or washing, we each got into our own bed.

“This room is sort of dirty,” Sarah said.

I looked around. A pair of reading glasses rested on the edge of the sink, as did a used bar of soap. A button down shirt was draped across the slightly open door of the armoire. Three pairs of slippers—one pair next to each bed.

It hit me. “Sarah,” I said. “They gave us their room.”

OK, so the sheets weren’t clean, and neither was the room, but I was so touched it didn’t matter to me. I slept deeply that night and woke up content and relaxed, ready to see Damascus, hoping to encounter more people as gentle and friendly as the men who gave up their beds.

“There’s no room here for you! Go!” the Syrian hotel clerk pointed at the door. We stood, frozen, looking through the glass-paned door at the dark streets of Damascus.

We were two women, weary about the prospect of wandering around downtown Damascus in the middle of the night. But we were also weary of price gouging. It was 1:30 AM and we’d just arrived to the city. We’d spent five hours on the Lebanese-Syrian border as one mustached, cigarette-smoking Syrian border guard after another told us our visas would be ready in an hour. Then another hour. Finally our visas were granted. After the short ride from the border, we went straight to a hotel that our Lonely Planet highly recommended… only to find that the clerk was quoting us double the price listed in the guidebook.

When we’d walked in, he’d eyed us—up and down—taking in all the signs of travel fatigue. We’d asked for a double. He quoted us 60 dollars and offered to show us the room. “This had better be an amazing room,” my travel mate, Sarah, whispered to me as we followed him up the stairs.

It wasn’t. A handful of tiny roaches were scurrying across the walls. Sarah flicked an unfamiliar bug off of a bed. “For 60 dollars a night? No way,” she said to the clerk. He shrugged, indifferent, what did he care if we were two women alone on the street?

Back downstairs, I tried to haggle with the clerk, but he repeated the same price over and over.

“But it says 30 in the guidebook,” I insisted.

“That’s an old book. Prices change,” he said with a sniff.

A European couple walked in. “Wait,” I said to them. “Are you guys staying in a double?”

“Yes,” they said hesitantly, looking at each other.

“How much are you paying?” I asked.

“Thirty,” they said.

I threw my hands up in the air and turned to the clerk.

“They’re paying in Euros,” he said.

Sarah, who speaks and reads a little bit of Arabic, spied a framed government document—an approved price list—on the wall behind him.

“Just a second,” she said. She pointed to the sign. “That says 30.”

And that’s when he kicked us out.

We went from one hotel to the next, only to be told that there were no rooms left. One clerk explained to us that October is high season in Damascus and that the hotels were full of Iranians and Europeans. She wished us luck and sent us back into the night.

(To be continued…)