"... People always assume that if you grew up in Lebanon, as I did, your memories must be monopolised by war. Certainly, I have loads of those.
Whenever I think of Lebanon, however, the projector in my head plays nature films — swimming in ice-cold rivers, clambering over deserted Roman ruins, walking rhodesian ridgebacks through pine forests.
This, in my opinion, is the problem with this year’s fad of recommending that you visit Beirut. ....... I’m not disputing any of this. Beirut is a fabulous place to visit — amazing bars, great food, extraordinary history — but, when you really get down to it, it’s pretty much like any other large, buzzing Mediterranean city, just with a bit of war chic.
To me, the real magic of Lebanon starts the moment you leave Beirut, leave the traffic and noise, and head for the mountains that serve as such a wonderful backdrop. ..... I had a splendid lunch in a huge Bedouin-style tent. I always forget just how fabulous Lebanese food is. After a long and lazy meal, I meandered off back down the mountain. I kept stopping along the way — I hadn’t seen the Jisr al-Hajar, a natural stone bridge with an arch of 125ft, since I was a kid.......
The following morning, I was back in my car, heading for the Bekaa Valley, to revisit Baalbek. When I arrived, I parked up outside my favourite hotel in the whole of the Middle East, the Palmyra — which is where all the great and good of Levantine history have laid their heads at one time or another. I had a cup of staggeringly strong coffee in the courtyard over looking the ruins before heading off for some serious temple-trampling.
Baalbek is an astonishingly beautiful place — an architectural homage to all things bacchanalian, plonked right in the middle of a Hezbollah stronghold. Hezbollah, however, are not the Taliban, and the two live side by side in true Lebanese pragmatism. Whenever I visit Baalbek, I like to sit on the edge of the temple of Baal, my feet dangling over, feeling the cool, ancient stones on my skin and reading the centuries-old graffiti on the pillars surrounding me. I try to imagine what it must have been like to come across this place for the first time as an ancient traveller. I so wish I lived in an age when you could still be an explorer...
I was back in Beirut in time for supper........I spent 20 minutes listening to some Starbucks workers converse in that oh-so-Lebanese way of chucking three languages into one sentence: “Yanni, hier, t’as vu ce mec? I told him, ‘Shou baddak, cheri? Wahad soy milk machiatto?’” (continue, here)
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