{"id":174,"date":"2010-12-24T22:53:23","date_gmt":"2010-12-24T16:53:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/3dengineer.com\/travel\/?p=174"},"modified":"2010-12-24T22:53:23","modified_gmt":"2010-12-24T16:53:23","slug":"stormy-times-in-lebanon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3dengineer.com\/travel\/?p=174","title":{"rendered":"Stormy times in Lebanon"},"content":{"rendered":"

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We were curious to visit this troubled country that has featured heavily on the news for most of our childhood and teenage years. We had heard good stuff about Lebanon but for us it was unfortunately a very mixed bag. We\u2019ve travelled around very poor countries, countries suffering from food shortages or trade embargos, police states, dictatorships. However, there is something in the air in Lebanon that makes you feel low all the time. It\u2019s a country where the difference between rich and poor is enormous, at times even disturbing. Most poor people – street vendors, bus drivers and passengers – we met were very nice while the wealthier people were typically indifferent and sometimes even rude.<\/p>\n

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Appearances do matter hugely here. It\u2019s an elitist society and there isn\u2019t much of a middle. Never in our lives have we seen so many Hummers and SUVs and it feels like the people driving them really do own the streets. In between you see old battered rusty cars barely able to make it. You see people dressed up like out of a fashion catalogue, throwing their money at the street vendors. Litterally throwing and not handing it over. Then again you see lots of people in dusty clothes with holes in them trying to make a living. There are incredibly hip and expensive nightclubs, restaurants, shops and fancy apartment blocks, especially in Beirut. Dotted in between are burned out buildings with bullet holes in the walls and run down tower blocks. It\u2019s hard to make sense of it all. We don\u2019t know of course what it means to live through a civil war that lasted for almost two decades. We don\u2019t know what it feels like to fear that the situation may kick off again. We tried to understand it and like the place but in the end it was all very much a \u2018meh\u2019 experience with few highlights.<\/p>\n

But let\u2019s start again at the beginning.<\/p>\n

When crossing into Lebanon your first sight will be most likely soldiers, army cars and tanks. Anybody official wears an army uniform. The boarder guards are in uniform, in the cities there are military posts on almost every corner and along the streets there are check points every few kms. All uniformed people are very friendly and helpful though and we were often greeted with a big smile and welcome. Our first stop was the city Tripoli (Trablous in Arabic) in the north of the country, a city that hasn\u2019t had it very easy with some street fighting happening only a couple of years ago. This has left its marks and it\u2019s quite a run down place with a lot of buildings with bullet holes in the walls. But it also has a nice souq and a small old city that we wanted to check out before heading further south. Unfortunately a terrible storm, the worst for more than 25 years, swept over the country. In no time it started to rain like crazy, the streets turned into rivers and you simply couldn\u2019t go for a stroll in these conditions. So we decided to cut our stay in Tripoli short and head down to Beirut instead where there are more indoor options and wait out the storm there.<\/p>\n

It took a few days for the storm to pass but luckily Beirut has a lot of coffee shops where you can hang around, overdose on cafe lattes and surf the net. In one of those coffee shops we had some more excitement than we wished for. While we were totally absorbed in checking our emails, I saw with one eye this hand in my bag skillfully snatching some cash out of my wallet. In a reflex I grabbed the arm, spun around and held on as hard as I could. To cut the story short, James did a really great job and blocked the guy so we could check that we had still all our stuff before he slipped away. It all happened so quickly but we did tell management to keep an eye out for the future. Needless to say that this can happen anywhere around the world. Lebanon is in fact a safe country in terms of petty crime.<\/p>\n

As soon as the sun came out again we checked out the various quarters. If you don\u2019t mind walking a few kms you can pretty much see the main parts in two days and most importantly you can avoid taxi drivers who will try to take you for a ride… Hamra is where most of the coffee shops are but also any US fast food outlet you can think of which we didn\u2019t expect to that extent. Before the civil war Beirut used to be called the \u201cParis of the Middle East\u201d and you can feel that Parisian atmosphere in the arty quarter Gemmayzeh. In between is Downtown which apparently was once very beautiful. However, that\u2019s where the centre of fighting between a group of Christians, called Phalangists, and Muslim fighters was during the civil war years from 1976 to 1990 which split the city in two. During the last few years the rebuilding of this area has started which has turned it into a weird place. The entire area is fenced off with barbed wire, no traffic is allowed and to enter you\u2019ve to pass military checkpoints and your bags will be searched. The buildings and streets are sterile and were, at least when we were there, deserted. It was actually pretty depressing to walk around and we quickly moved on. The promenade, the Corniche, is ok but not exactly the most exciting promenade you\u2019ll see. Not far is the infamous Holiday Inn which is where snipers used to position themselves and the burned out building is still standing – most probably the most sobering reminder of this horrible period in Lebanon\u2019s history.<\/p>\n

After a few days in Beirut we felt we had enough of the crazy traffic and noise and headed to quiet and pretty Byblos (Jbail in Arabic). It\u2019s a cute little fishing port with some nice ruins, souq and harbour. It has a Mediterranean feel to it and it reminded us a lot of what we had seen in Turkey. We originally wanted to do some hiking in the Qadisha Valley or the Cedars but winter had already kicked in and we don\u2019t have any real winter clothes with us. So we decided to stick to the coast instead and headed down to the very south of the country, to Tyre (Sour in Arabic) not far from the border to Israel.<\/p>\n

Tyre is another city which has been at the centre of much conflict, especially during the 2006 Hezbollah-Israel war. The closer we got we saw Hezbollah flags lining the streets, pictures of their current leader Hassan Nasrallah everywhere. This is where you\u2019ll see the most Palestinian refugee camps although in Tyre they\u2019re rather permanent buildings since they\u2019ve been here for a while. This is also where many of the UN troops are stationed. In fact you can\u2019t walk 50m without coming across a UN or Lebanese soldier. Of all the places we\u2019ve been in Lebanon this is where the violent history of the last few decades will hit you most. It\u2019s a pretty grim town with some alright streets in the Christian quarter and ruins dotted between the new town, the Christian quarter and the outskirts of the Palestinian refugee camps.<\/p>\n

From Tyre we headed up the coast again to Sidon (Saida in Arabic) which was quite a nice surprise because of its atmospheric souq and the best falafel sandwiches I have ever eaten. Quite an experience to see them made as well. There were all sorts of ingredients flying through the air which were then thrown, mashed on some flat bread and rolled up. Delicious.<\/p>\n

Our last stop in Lebanon was Baalbek in the Bekka Valley where Lebanon\u2019s most important ancient ruins lie. They are Lebanon\u2019s biggest tourist attraction and for a good reason. The Baalbek ruins are by far the most impressive Roman ruins we\u2019ve seen so far. They\u2019re incredibly well preserved and the scale is just crazy. If there is one reason to come to Lebanon then it has to be Baalbek. The Bekka Valley is also the homeland of the Hezbollah and Baalbek is the administrative headquarter which you\u2019ll find out very soon when you hop off the bus and you\u2019ve street vendors running at you trying to sell you a Hezbollah T-Shirt. But apart from that it\u2019s a quiet, friendly place and it made for a nice change from the coast.<\/p>\n

After Baalbek we felt we had seen enough and decided to make our way from there back to Syria, to Damascus. So we hopped on a minibus to Chtaura from where we had to share the front seat of a shared taxi across the border. That didn\u2019t seem to bother the boarder guards in the slightest. In fact, the Lebanon-Syria crossing was one of the funniest crossings we\u2019ve ever done. We were expecting to wait again for a couple of hours to get our visa or potentially encounter some difficulties. However, when we entered the building and walked up to the counter where it said \u201cforeign arrivals\u201d, the guy looked at us and pointed to his neighbour who was fast asleep in his chair. So we we went to his counter and looked at him for a while until the guy next to him waved us over to him. This guy was, we kid you not, taking sips from a can of Heineken that he had hidden behind his monitor. He then sent us to a different counter to get our visa where a guy sitting in a tracksuit issued it without even properly checking where we were from. It was back to the beer loving dude who gave us our entry stamps barely looking at our entry forms that we had only half filled in. All that took only about ten minutes and off we were to beautiful Damascus where we\u2019re now and are absolutely loving it.<\/p>\n

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Click for photos of Lebanon<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We were curious to visit this troubled country that has featured heavily on the news for most of our childhood and teenage years. We had heard good stuff about Lebanon but for us it was unfortunately a very mixed bag. We\u2019ve travelled around very poor countries, countries suffering from food shortages or trade embargos, police … Continue reading Stormy times in Lebanon<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[12],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3dengineer.com\/travel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3dengineer.com\/travel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3dengineer.com\/travel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3dengineer.com\/travel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3dengineer.com\/travel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=174"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/3dengineer.com\/travel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":179,"href":"https:\/\/3dengineer.com\/travel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174\/revisions\/179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3dengineer.com\/travel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3dengineer.com\/travel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3dengineer.com\/travel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}