Travel Tips

Our plans began to unravel at the border. Thousands packed the immigration and passport offices on both the Lebanon and Syrian side. What should have taken ten minutes to process took four, chaotic hours.

We should have been able to get a free one month visa at the border. They refused and stamped our passports with an almost useless 48 hour transit visa.

Finally into Lebanon, now well after dark, and the bus broke down. We were abandoned with all the other passengers on the hard shoulder for an hour. A sympathetic bus driver eventually pulled over, with already a bus full of passengers, and somehow we all squeezed on board and we limped on toward Beirut.

Nearing the city and huge billboards advertised 'super nightclubs' and the many roadblocks were manned by soldiers armed with some fairly serious hardwear including tanks.

In the city we booked into the Talal's House Hotel. The owner offered us a 'discount on a private room', which turned out to be just an empty dormitory. We found a late night café to eat at then retired to bed.
As we slept that night someone got into the room and stole our communal kitty purse containing several hundred dollars. For logistical reasons, and by pure chance, it was the first night ever on the trip we had carried that amount of money in the kitty. Infuriating rotten luck.

The next day I informed the manager. He didn’t want to listen and made no effort to help or even offer a sympathetic word.

We explored the city on foot, strolling the cornishe, or 'Beirut Riviera' so I could stop and catch some rays from the hot sun, therefore knocking another ambition from the list of 'Things to do…'

Beirut had been an important destination for me, brought up on images of Lebanon's war throughout the late seventies and the eighties. It was a ghost to be exorcized.

Having been almost completely destroyed during the fighting, a frantic re-building program was well underway to restore its image as the 'Paris of the Middle East'. I was completely baffled as to any connections with Paris, other than some spoke French. Glass and concrete towers were rising from the rubble and 'Downtown' Solidare looked like a life-size plastic model of an Edwardian toy town. The exclusive shops there, void of customers, seemed too expensive even for the Beirutis, who, judging by all the Mercs and BMW's around, had plenty of cash.

The extensive café culture I had expected didn’t exist. The city, in fact, was ugly. It was more pleasant to look out to sea and try to ignore it. A few bullet scared buildings were all that held my interest.

We made some enquiries. Yes, we could extend our transit visas easily and for free. We didn’t bother. I feel that sometimes, if you are on a roll of bad luck, it is wiser to break to cycle rather than hobble on like a wounded rodent in the vain hope nothing else will go wrong.

Of course, a personal opinion of a country is based almost solely on one's personal experience of that country.

Lebanon? For me?

What a **** hole.

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