A COUNTRY full of fascinating history, from Roman ruins to crusader castles, but unspoilt and well off the beaten tourist path, with polite, hospitable people, virtually no crime and low prices. The only snag, the offbeat holiday destination I’m describing happens to be Syria.

Of course, I’m not talking about the nation currently racked by its own version of the Arab Spring. No, this was the travel agents’ spin from the early 1990s, when America was the only superpower left and most Arab states, Syria included, had joined the US-led coalition in the first Gulf War.

There seemed genuine grounds for peace hopes in the Middle East and Syria appeared to be opening up a little. A holiday firm specialising in tours of historic spots in the region had started running vacations in Jordan and Syria, and a friend and fellow former history student suggested it was an opportunity to experience the wonders such places as Jordan’s “rose-red city” of Petra, and the ancient settlement of Palmyra and the vast crusader castle of Krak des Chevaliers in Syria.

All was going well until our coach approached the heavily fortified Syrian border from Jordan and it turned out I had foolishly scribbled the fact I was a journalist by profession on one of the many pieces of paper we had to fill in; I thought it was for the Jordanian authorities, who didn’t seem terribly scary. Unfortunately, it went to the Syrian authorities – who, it turned out, were very suspicious of journalists, even off-duty ones.

I was hauled off the bus for questioning, and kept at the border post as my fellow tourists moved on. I was there 12 hours, taking a curiously detached view of proceedings, as though they weren’t happening to me – until a “colonel of intelligence” turned up, who evidently scared the border guards and officials quite a lot so I thought maybe I should be worried too.

He thought I might be a French investigative journalist using a false passport, but presumably they decided I wasn’t their man, as I was eventually deported back into Jordan. Since then I have always felt at least a passing interest whenever Syria is in the news – which has been quite a lot recently. It may seem strange to try to draw any conclusions about a country on the basis of a 12-hour stay in a border post, but I wonder if sometimes even a glimpse of a society can give a person some sort of feeling about it.

Though I wasn’t mistreated by the Syrian authorities – my troubles actually increased when I was dumped, alone and short of ready cash, in Jordan – it was enlightening to encounter first-hand a situation where officials could do pretty well anything they wanted to anyone, all in the name of an all-pervading state security.

It’s something we westerners read about, but experiencing it is another matter.

There was nothing particularly clever or efficient about it, but that doesn’t diminish the climate of fear such a system creates. We occasionally endure official heavy-handedness and injustice in the west, but in places like Syria it’s the norm, and even arguing about it is dangerous.

The contrast with neighbouring Jordan was striking; the Hashemite kingdom may not have been a model democracy, but compared with Syria it was a heartland of liberalism.

My friend, who completed his tour, later told his wife, who had spent a lot of time in Germany, that Syria was “like the east before the wall came down”. In other words, it was a highly controlled police state, with the lid firmly on.

The struggle to prise that lid off is proving a predictably violent one, as the all-controlling state finds it cannot relax its grip for fear of being ripped apart by the explosion of released forces.

I find myself full of admiration for those who dare defy such a system, but the prospect of a happy ending for their country seems an ever-more distant one, no matter how often I check the news.