CLASHES ON THE IRAQ BORDER, foreign jihadis trickling eastward, U.S. Special Forces allegedly conducting covert incursions inside Syria itself: It seemed like a fine time for a road trip.

I had a guide in mind. In 1909, before he was "of Arabia" and when Syria was still part of the Ottoman Empire, 21-year-old T.E. Lawrence had set out in similar circumstances—instability, banditry, and halting Arabic—to write his Oxford thesis on the Crusader castles scattered along Syria's coast. For two months he mapped the dozens of visually linked keeps and signal towers built by the European invaders in the 11th and 12th centuries, sleeping in Arab houses and walking huge swaths of the Nusayriyah Mountains with a sketchbook, a pistol, and a Boy Scout shirt tailored by his mother with extra pockets. Except for the pistol and shirt, I was good to go.

Reaching the first and greatest of these castles, Krak des Chevaliers, was a three-hour drive on good roads and the edge of death. I'd quickly learned to pick older, feebler taxis, but the rounded Renault was still squeezed from both sides by trucks going 70 as

I had found the least conservative place in Syria. Alcohol was everywhere, women went around in short skirts, and on the beach the next day, I saw that rarest of all things, the Arab bikini.

grinning motorcyclists and panicked donkeys wove crosswise through the mix. Occasional interlopers shot at us headlong, down the wrong side of the divided highway. The bleak landscape was interrupted only by giant statues of the late dictator, Hafez al-Assad, and a road sign that read thank you for visiting hama. Hama is where dear old Hafez used tanks to kill at least 10,000 of his citizens while crushing a 1982 rebellion.

Tucked up inside a pass, controlling the high ground, was Krak des Chevaliers, Castle of the Knights, a staggering work of medieval ambition with exquisitely preserved double-curtain walls, towers, battlements, and, yes, a spot for dumping boiling oil on the enemy. Lawrence said it was better than any castle in Europe. From the top of a tower once occupied by Richard the Lionheart, I could see, a dozen miles to the northwest, a small fortress clearly visible against the sky, the next link in the Christian war machine that held much of this coast for close to two centuries.

The Lawrence trail led me to the quiet seaside town of Tartus, where sidewalk cafés gave off clouds of sweet apple tobacco under a full moon. The Crusader fort here had a good restaurant inside the walls. The next day I ran north in a rusted Mercedes 300D. The big Crusader fortress at Marqab, made of black basalt, loomed over the narrow coastal plain like a thundercloud, but the coast itself, a lost bit of Mediterranean Riviera that Lawrence had loved, was now a trash-strewn eyesore, decorated with absurdly huge cement plants and terminals for Syria's tiny oil industry. Even on the isle of Arwad, where a small castle marked the Europeans' last foothold in the East, nobody had gotten Dr. Barmada's memo. Scrap metal and oil slicks ruined the crashing of deep-blue waves.

Lawrence led me on. In Latakia, the country's main port, neon lit up the busiest nightlife north of Beirut. Home to the fiercely secular Alawite leadership, Latakia was the least conservative place in Syria, a small city with as many bars and restaurants as Damascus. The hotels were taken up with spectacular weddings, floral atrocities conducted to blaring pop music and live video feeds. Alcohol was everywhere, women went around in short skirts, and just once, at the beach the next day, I saw that rarest of all things, the Arab bikini.

Above the city, the last green juniper forests of Syria concealed another incomprehensible, absurdly grand castle, Qalat Saladin. My cheery Latakian driver screeched his Lada right to the edge of an overhang to show me why: Ringing a tiny mountaintop, the fortress was surrounded by steep ravines on three sides. The Crusaders had hewed out the rock on the fourth side to make an unassailable edifice. But in 1188, they'd been blasted out in just two days by the great Islamic general Saladin.

While standing there, imagining the giant catapults that had shattered the walls, I was nosed off the road by a minivan that disgorged 15 Dutch tourists. We glared at each other. Syria is like Turkey in the sixties: People expect to have a ruin all to themselves, thank you.

Their local guide broke into a grin when he learned where I was from.

"You see?" he said, turning to his Dutch clients. "There is no terrorism in Syria. Even the American is alive."