Not the kind of place most westerners with no connection to the country would choose as a holiday spot, I know, but Lebanon has a strong appeal to me. There are three good reasons, history, people and terrain. Those are the good bits, and the not so good bits, well they have a kind of eccentric charm for the most part.
Lebanon is the most convenient place to ski if you are located in the Middle East. Faraya, about an hour and a half from Beirut, offers really nice slopes for the rather short season. Way back in January 2008 my friend and I ventured there to try it out. We hoped to spend a full week enjoying ourselves on the slopes, honing our absolutely abysmal skiing techniques. A day of pottering about on our own convinced us that we needed an instructor and so we spent the next day with a young local guy improving our skills. After that it snowed and snowed and snowed, so hard they shut the resort down. The heaviest snow in 60 years, someone said, and that was the end of our skiing for the week.
The first blizzard day we swaped our rented skis for snowshoes, but that turned out to be a joke. We could hardly put one foot in front of the other, the snow was blowing so hard. Any trails had disappeared under enormous drifts. It was just impossible, but we had a laugh trying. We spent the rest of the day watching a rather good movie in our hotel room.
Determined to make the most of our trip, we ventured on foot down the mountain (still blizzard conditions) to view some Roman ruins nearby, but the snow was so heavy that when we reached the ruins, only metres in front of us, we could only just make out the shape of some ghostly columns through the steady snowfall.
Enough was enough, we took a snow taxi into Beirut the next day driving through some beautiful scenery on the way. Of course it was not snowing in Beirut ... just raining cats and dogs. Along the sea road waves were crashing dramatically to shore. The snow taxi actually only took us so far, to the edge of the snow in the mountains, then another taxi took us the rest of the way. In the centre of the city we found a couple of the best bookshops I have ever seen, stacked to the ceiling with new and oldish titles, everything really, but some great political stuff.
We found a Starbucks - strange for Beirut I would have thought, as the Lebanese, next to the Palestinians and the most affected victims of Israeli aggression. Starbucks is universally hated by most politically minded Arabs, although Dubai has a disproportiate number of Starbucks stores, but I digress. Some strange guy seated himself next to my friend and started asking if she was looking for a husband, and did she want children. That's one way of scaring people away from Starbucks, I guess.
Walking down Al Hamra Street we were encountered a local television crew, stopping people at random to ask opinions. They nabbed us walking past and with a smattering of Arabic we were able to explain that we didn't speak the language, we were tourists. The guy with the microphone looked a bit stunned - bet he doesn't encounter that very often.
According to our map of Beirut (haha) we should be able to find the National Museum of Lebanon quite easily. Just a short taxi ride away. Actually it would have been too if the army did not have the street blocked off. Our poor taxi driver got held up with us for about 45 minutes on what should have been a 5 minute trip as we followed a diversion then got held up in standstill traffic. When we eventually got to the museum we didn't have a great deal of time left before closing.
Apart from the guards, we were the only people in there. The exhibits were extraordinary with items from most of Lebanon's many historic and pre-historic sites. We both could have spent much longer reading and looking, but we decided that we would like to try to get back to our hotel at Faraya which would mean complicated coordination with different taxis. Obviously not used to interested customers, the lady at the museum gift shop seemed visibly irritated at my friend handling the merchandise, but we managed to purchase some lovely little faux relics of Pheonician ilk.
Back in the mountains I got stuck into a book about the Pheonicians (written in Victorian times and updated in a modern paperback cover). Looking back I feel this was the moment when I became truly intrigued by Lebanon and her incredible past. It became a necessity of life for me to discover as much as possible about this remarkable race of people whose skills as ship builders, mariners and artisans preceded those of almost any other civilization. The Pheonicians are credited with having created an alphabet of symbols representing phonetic sounds, rather than the picture symbols of hyroglyphic scripts. We have a lot to thank them for.
We moved into Beirut for the final couple of days of our visit as our hopes of seeing the ski slopes open were by this time completely dashed. Far from being disappointed in our trip, we were impressed by Lebanon, and in idle conversation we talked about how nice it would be to live there. Each of us wistfully speculated about the possibility of working via internet, not too practical a consideration for my friend who is a human resources professional, but a possibility for me as a writer, I imagined. I might be able to live in Lebanon.
