I've not posted a diary entry for a while, but that's not to say that I've not been busy mapping!

I've added some roads plus the monastry at Maarmusa and the other week I drove to Palmyra, taking a new route back. I found a good stretch of unmapped highway from the Palmyra to Homs highway heading southwest towards Damascus that eventually leads onto the Damascus to Homs highway. I've also joined a few roads at some of the villages on the way as well as changing some more roads to railways (my pet gripe of remote mappers!).

At the weekend I walked around the old city in Damascus and have added a few more POIs to the map. I also drove up to Maaloula and added a couple of roads and the Maaloula hotel, as well as the turn off and motorway bridge on the Homs highway that leads to Maaloula.

On my Garmin I'm still having issues with routing from Damascus to Palmyra... the device goes into enless iterations of route calculations before eventually crashing and switching itself off. I've tried chopping the road up into shorter sections to see if this helps?

Yesterday was a public holiday in Syria, so we decided to pay a visit to the monastery at Mar Musa, about an hour drive from Damascus off the Homs highway. And of course, I always have an ulterior motive to do some mapping on such journeys.

Now that I'm using the OSM data for satnav on my Garmin, my attention is drawn to problem areas on the map. I've had ongoing problems with the Homs highway leading out of Damascus, previously on my trips to Palmyra, which I thought I'd fixed but my trip yesterday informed me otherwise. I've therefore completely remapped the highway and extended the mapping as two roads up to An Nabk, the junction that leads off to the road to Mar Musa... hopefully this will sort out the problem? It's strange, because the route back into Damascus is calculated no problem at all?

You can read all about Mar Musa on Wikipedia, but suffice to say it's a nice little retreat and worth the visit. On the way back, I managed to persuade the group I was with to take an alternative route, based on the advice of my Garmin. In hindsight, this was a bad decision and probably I won't ever be trusted again for directions, as the route led us along a very poor road and straight through the middle of a military zone. Fortunately, the check points were not manned so we weren't turned back, but just goes to show that you shouldn't trust the maps unless you know the roads! I preach again... don't get too carried away with remote mapping! If you remote map a road then at least label the road type as unknown and certainly not as "primary" just because it show up nicely on the satellite image!

I took the still unfinished extension of the southern bypass on the way back and mapped a bit more of it. Hopefully it will be completed in the next few months and it can be mapped properly.

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Went camping this weekend in the volcanos to the east of Damascus International airport. Followed a track from a colleague which I've now added to the map and I've also added some sand tracks off the road.

Great camping here, except being woken up in the morning by the rumble of tanks, fighter planes flying overhead and heavy artilery fire... a full blown military exercise was being conducted in the area, but none of the soldiers seemed to mind us being there.

The tracks are pretty good fun for driving on and the volcanos make for quite a dramatic landscape... is it possible to label these as POIs, such as natural=crater?

I'll definitely be back here, either for camping or for further exploring the tracks and the craters. I've not added it, but the road continues to the east before heading north and joining the Damascus to Palmyra highway... but I don't know if it's all black top or if there's some offroading involved?

There's still lots of railways labelled as roads on the map, which I'm relabelling and adding level crossings where they cross the roads. Please be careful when remote mapping!

I learned something this week... I've previously been using a Nokia phone for tracking but am now using a Garmin device. I realised that if I import the track to the Garmin software (I'm using RoadTrip) then I can export the track AND the POIs to upload into OSM! This is a real breakthrough for me since I didn't have the patience to add remote POIs manually, but now I make a waypoint mark with my Garmin and can then simply add it in OSM... great!

I've heard that some of my colleagues have gathered a lot of track data here in Syria which I'll try and get hold of and start loading into OSM.

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