The “I Love Bashar” magnet has taken its place in the patchwork holiday album on the fridge door. It certainly stands out from the more traditional images of Thorpe Park, Yosemite and the Rockefeller Centre.

Syria is our most unlikely holiday destination yet, though Mozambique runs a close second. As our boys have turned into adults, so our holidays have evolved from mainstream family fun to travels in places a little farther off the tourist track. Morocco was the start.

We did the popular mix of Atlas mountains and Marrakesh, where the Djemaa el-Fna and the souk were the star turns. The boys competed to buy the cheapest fake Rolex. Their dad taught them the critical “walk-away” routine.

Crowds gathered in the dusk around medieval-style storytellers. Men offered them drugs in the street. Despite trips to much more distant countries, our sons agreed it was the most exotic place they had ever visited. We all loved it.

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The following year we travelled to Botswana, South Africa and Mozambique, circling the pariah state of Zimbabwe as that country’s elections took place. This mix of travel laced with equal parts luxury and current affairs reached its apotheosis in Maputo, Mozambique.

We found ourselves in the bar of the colonial Hotel Polana. On a backdrop fit for a Bond movie we watched a Chinese businessmen mingle with South African fixers, English snake-oil salesmen and local hookers. It was Graham Greene meets Blood Diamond.

It was the search for somewhere offering a similar mix that took us to Syria. People reacted to the choice in one of three ways: “Oh . . .” (the polite friends), “Why on Earth . . .” (the closer friends) and “It’s fantastic, you’ll love it” (from anyone who had already been).

You soon understand why. In a field of spring flowers and 5th-century ruins a young Bedu leapt down from his tractor and ran over. He addressed us in the common human language of smiles and welcomes, shaking our hands with a palm as leathery as the soles of our shoes — an alien analogy in a land of plastic Chinese footwear.

We were visiting one of the “Dead Cities”, the remains of Byzantine and Crusader settlements that lie scattered across the hillsides of northwest Syria.

High stone arches, held up by physics rather than cement, huge church walls, their corners unmarked by time or cannonballs, detailed carvings on columns and pediments, caves with tombs, pyramids with tombs: Hadrian’s Wall will never be quite the same.

One day these monuments will make up the itinerary of the typical Syrian tourist. In ten years’ time, perhaps. For now Syria is a place where Western visitors are a source of fascination.

There can be no better guide to a country where 2,000 years of history seem visible daily than William Dalrymple’s From the Holy Mountain, his 1997 travelogue that chronicles the collapse of Christianity as an Eastern religion.

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