From Barrow to Beirut

More pictures of Lebanon and an excerpt from my unpublished travel book From Barrow to Beirut.

1 With the beautiful arches, the Khan al Khayyatin, the tailors' market, in Tripoli. This medieval market has been restored very prettily and is still full of clothes shops.

2 St Anthony's cave, Qozhaiya. The cave is attached to St Anthony's monastery up in the Qadisha Gorge. Insane people used to be chained to the rock in the background for a few days (you can just make out the chains hanging down). If the lock on the chain around their neck was opened, it was believed St Anthony had worked a miracle to cure them and they were allowed to go home.

3 A 14th century Islamic school or madrasa in Tripoli, built by the Mameluke conquerors. After razing Tripoli to the ground, they rebuilt it so a lot of Tripolitan architecture is Mameluke. Most of the madrasas look similar to this one, the dome being a typical feature. Tripoli's architectural heritage has been badly neglected because of the recent war in Lebanon and most of the medieval buildings are sadly in need of repair and renovation

4 Icon of Mary in the Byzantine church at Mantara near Sidon. This icon was donated by St Helena, mother of the Byzantine emperor Constantine. He was the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity, and he made the empire Christian. On the site of this church, Mary is said to have waited for Jesus when he came to Sidon and Tyre. Mantara means waiting.

The white lines across the picture are metal bars. Legend has it that during a time of unrest, the icon was moved to Tyre Cathedral for safety. Twice, it miraculously found its way back to Mantara. The Bishop of Tyre then agreed to leave it there. The metal bars are to prevent theft - or to stop it moving again!

5 The Martyrs' statue in Burj Square, downtown Beirut. The martyrs were executed in 1915 and 1916 for rebelling against Ottoman rule in Lebanon. The statue represents both suffering and victory.

The following is an excerpt from the travel book I've written about this lovely country and its crazy people.

DEATHROW 2000 - THE BEIRUT-DAMASCUS HIGHWAY

And the road goes on. The pass across Mount Lebanon at Dahr al Baidar is the highest point on the Big Dipper to Damascus. Up until here, the spectacular scenery is to right and left. Where the road loops the loop round the mountain, suddenly the view opens out in front too, onto the Beqa'a Valley. In winter, Omo-bright hills on the left bask in sunlight, unidentifiable humped shapes of furniture under pristine dustcovers waiting to be uncovered when the spring cleaning's done. On the right, where no sun reaches, the snow wears a shadowy grey dishdasha and lurks tiredly in nooks and crannies like an exhausted Syrian labourer. The two sides of the road remind me of the contrasting shirts shown in the advert "someone's mother doesn't know that Persil washes whiter."

On winter and spring afternoons around 4pm, Dahr al Baidar gets fogged over, which gives the kamikaze route an added attraction in many people's view. It has led to the development of a popular game called "how fast can you go when you can't see an inch in front of your nose?" It's similar to Blind Man's Buff but played in a car not on foot and with smog not your school scarf.

For some reason, local people consider Dahr al Baidar more dangerous when snowed up. I don't. When it's completely snowed under, the road is closed and deviants like myself who don't have strong deathwishes can breathe sighs of relief and relax for the all-too-few hours it takes for snowploughs to clear and reopen the road.

Even when snow-covered but open, it's safer. I once visited friends in Baalbek for a weekend. Well, not friends exactly, hospitable acquaintances. I had visited Omar's class, composed mainly of middle-aged business people. One of the students, anxious both to be sociable and to practise his English with a native speaker while he had the rare opportunity, invited me to meet his family. His wife was a cheerful, chatty person, completely dominated by two overwhelmingly tyrannical sons, one of 8 or 9, the other only about 2 or 3. After tea and biscuits, they invited me to spend a weekend at Baalbek with them. His wife came from Baalbek and would be delighted to show me around the ruins. I'd seen the ruins more than once, but thought it might be interesting to see them with a local.

Unfortunately, I didn't enjoy the tour much as their elder son insisted on sticking to his mother like a leech and accompanying us. He was the kind of runt who should have been drowned at birth and how they managed to stick him for so long I will never comprehend. Although he was male, and the idolised first-born at that, any sensible Chinese mother would've left him face down on a box of ashes to wither up and blow away. Even though he wasn't a twin, any 19th century Nigerian Igbo father would've dumped his body in the Evil Forest to rot.

The degree of his obnoxiousness can be seen in the events of the Saturday evening when his parents urged him to display his knowledge of English. At first he earned my respect by behaving like a normal child and refusing steadfastly to do circus tricks for my benefit. But then his cousin caved in to his parents' rival demands, and reeled off a short poem which he'd learnt by heart, something of the "Boy Stood on the Burning Deck" variety. He mispronounced it so completely that it was fun, and his total lack of understanding of its content was so innocent that I clapped dutifully and murmured oily praise.

Infuriated that someone else had dared to steal his limelight even for a couple of minutes, the prima donna then launched into his own party piece, a much longer poem which he too had learnt parrot-fashion without understanding a single word. It went on and on and on. Mummy and Daddy took it without flinching, beaming approval that the whelp was playing so well to the gallery, sure that they had thereby provided me with the highlight of my visit to Lebanon. I sat and wished for the good old days when first-born sons were sacrificed to the fire of Moloch.

Sunday was bitterly cold but we muffled up and went to the temples anyway. Unlike during my first visit in 1986, the ticket office was now open as tourists were trickling back and in fact there were two or three foreigners there, French and Germans. I discovered that native sons and daughters - and their guests - get in free of charge, being considered visitors not tourists.

But that was the only good thing about that trip. Before the morning was out, I found myself half wishing I was up on Sheikh Abdallah Hill with my kidnapped colleagues, in the peace and quiet of the bunker under the Hezbollah barracks. My colleague, Brian Keenan, for example, would've given his eyeteeth to see the Baalbek temples rather than be confined to a succession of mattresses and radiators but even he wouldn't have been tough enough to withstand the Baalbeki Brat in situ.

To make matters worse, it was Eid el Fitr, when children set off firecrackers almost non-stop for three days. His Peskiness had brought a cigarette lighter with him and his mother didn't have the gumption to confiscate it. I would've done - teachers always seem to have more guts than parents when it comes to dealing with miscreants - but I couldn't catch him as he escaped out of reach by leaping like a mountain goat onto sacred pillars and cornices, which I would not have been so profane as to defile with my muddy trainers.

Previous writers have waxed lyrical about the glory of Baalbek at sunrise or sunset. I could have written a wonderful description of Baalbek under snow but short sharp shocks disturbing the peace of the ages every few seconds do nothing to enhance the atmosphere of 2000 years of history: there simply is no way to get into poetic mode when Mummy's little angel is chucking bangers around. Thus was a literary masterpiece lost to posterity.

Notwithstanding the unrepentant rapscallion, the family gave me an enjoyable weekend. We visited a village elder in a tatty shack next to a petrol station, and he turned out to be an important bigwig with an extensive interest in history and involvement in Middle Eastern affairs, and a large, fascinating photo collection of himself with anybody who was anybody in the Middle East, spanning the last 50 years or so.

We saw the stone bigger than the biggest stone in the world, discovered only recently across the road from its companion. We saw the enormous luxury villas with swimming pools, perhaps built with hashish cash or hostage ransom money. My hostess assured me the Syrian army had closed the drugs industry years before and I couldn't contradict this as February is not the harvest time so there was no evidence to the contrary on the ground. No doubt she'd have liked to add that they'd shut down the hostage business too, to enhance her town's reputation in my eyes, but she didn't dare as I had a number of colleagues still in chains.

They decided to set off for Beirut immediately after lunch since it looked as if it would snow. Sure enough, it started as we left and soon got into its stride. Just before we reached Dahr al Baidar, they told me the last time they'd got this far they'd been stuck for ten hours. With the two children in the car, this was really worrying news. Mother and father sat and shivered with apprehension, that they would again be entrapped with the sins of the next generation. I didn't blame them. Junior was bad enough but the Mark II copycat version was now also with us. I wouldn't have wanted to be cooped up with them in such a confined space for so long either.

But when we arrived at Dahr al Baidar, I forgot to feel sorry for the woe-begone parents because suddenly I felt like a natural historian discovering a rare species that was thought to be almost extinct. In Hamra, cars have to move at safe speeds because there are always too many of them for the narrow streets. I had thought the Hamra group the only surviving members of this breed. Yet here too a herd of slow-moving vehicles was alive and well, plodding front to tail ponderously like a line of elephants carefully treading a well-worn path, totally unlike the mad rogue stampede that was this road's usual wont.

And with what care conservationists were looking after their precious specimens. Gangs were fitting chains to control skidding wheels, groups of men were sitting on bonnets to add weight to gain traction, volunteer herdsmen were guiding individual strays from the edge of the abyss back to relative safety. It was the only careful driving I have ever seen in Lebanon and for the edifying but all too seldom seen spectacle of Lebanese driving safely, I cannot recommend Dahr al Baidar during a snowstorm too strongly.

Sannine and Dahr al Baidar are part of the Lebanon range. The road to Damascus is also flanked by the Anti-Lebanon. The two ranges present a stark contrast: Mount Lebanon is green, fertile and friendly-looking whereas the Anti-Lebanon is denuded of soil, barren and bleak. But in winter it is beautiful as snow settles erratically, leaving patchy tawny stripes clear so the low-slung body of the mountains resembles a tiger stretching out to sleep.

I decided to have my cake and eat it too by seeing both Mount Lebanon and the Anti-Lebanon ranges together. This entailed coming down the Beqa'a Valley from Homs to Chtaura. I did the journey in late spring so there wasn't much snow left, which made the contrast all the greater. The Anti-Lebanon appeared to be a forbidding battlement of hard brown stone, like the forlorn Peabody Buildings in Camberwell. The Dutch flatness of the Beqa'a laid out in between highlighted the height of the hills on either side. Mount Lebanon consisted of discrete domes of yielding velvet emerald, rising discreetly like the green domes of Shi'a mosques, softly rounded like the O at the end of the name of God in Arabic.

In a fit of d骠 vu, I realised with astonishment that the landscape was familiar. It reminded me of my childhood bedroom in Surrey.

When my elder brother and I were very young, we used to take all our favourite toys to bed with us. Billy, John's Teddy, had pride of place on his side of the bed (I still have Billy, with me here in Beirut). The tall, thin Mr Rabbit, who I erroneously remember as being bigger than either of us, next. Bluebell also known as Cuddleums my blue furry rag doll, Susan my Negro doll whose dress my mother had painstakingly made, Golly our Robertson's jam golliwog who we never realised was a symbol of racism, Tommy my yellow rubber cat (also still with me) who had lost his squeak after swimming in the bath several hundred times (maybe I should try the same treatment with my current pair, to stop their unrelenting dawn chorus). Closest to me, Margaret my lifesize baby doll who had originally been called Brenda.

That's what the view looked like. The Anti-Lebanon the dark oak foot of the bed, the Beqa'a spread out like a patchwork quilt, then the lumpy heads of all the Teddies and dolls under the green sheet of Mount Lebanon at the top of the bed.

Here's my second carousel. These are:

1 Mousayliha Castle or Qalaat Meszabeh. A medieval castle perched on top of an outcrop of rock, looking like something straight out of a Walt Disney film. It's called locally The Lovers' Castle because from the road it only looks big enough for two people. Behind is an ugly quarry - typical of the contemporary Lebanese landscape, unfortunately, due to the demand for limestone for reconstruction.

2 Roman columns in downtown Beirut. A fair bit of the Roman city has now been found, including the baths. The famous Law School has so far evaded archeologists, however.

3 The stunning sarcophagus of King Tabnit, which was found in a place called Apollo's Cave (Mougharat Abloun) near Sidon. The coffin is now in the Topkapi Museum in Istanbul, alongside a large display of coffins taken from Sidon and Tyre.

4 View through a lookout post from Tibnin in south Lebanon. This is the most impressive Crusader castle in Lebanon. Originally built in 1104 and rebuilt several times since, it's near the Irish UNIFIL post.

5 Roman columns at Tyre, from the 2nd century AD. At the foot of these is a lovely mosaic pavement and the columns lead down to the sea.

Links to other sites about Lebanon

Useful listings.

Service provider in Lebanon.

Eastwood College home page. One of the few good schools in Lebanon.

Links to my other pages

Home.

Illustrated Creed.

The Lord's Prayer.

Synopsis of my novel The Gift.

Lebanon photo album.

Guide to sexual harassment excerpts.

My Advent calendar.

Purrfect page.