DAY 237 - NOVEMBER 13, 2011
You stay in the car and anxiously wait for your driver to bribe the Hezbollah guards that line the roads. You go back and forth between keeping your passport at the ready or hiding all your identification somewhere in the car. Eventually you rest on the fact that if you don't have any identification on you, the guards will probably search you and the car anyway. Plus they will be more likely to think you're an American or Israeli spy. So you keep your passport under your left leg and hope that Lebanon and Syria don't want the international brunt of two American journalists turning up missing on their soil. When you creep up to the guard station, the guards indeed ask for your passport and when you show it to them, they ask you to get out of the car. Your driver attempts to bribe them but no amount of money seems to do the trick. Soon after, your head is pushed down and you are shuffled into a black SUV. You silently curse yourself as it begins to drive you for hours, past Damascus, and through long expanses of empty desert.