Week Sixty-Three

Another torrential thunderstorm overnight gradually clears through the morning: we spend the hours looking out the windows, doing more typing at the PC, and wondering why there are so many insects - during the day, the lounge quickly becomes invaded by flies, and there's a regular trail of determined ants across the kitchen worktop. Milla talks with the staff (Mahoud, general hand Antoine who otherwise works at the Port, and Zaher), and German Max (I played chess with him last night). We also re-learn how to play backgammon (we both used to play, but had forgotten where the pieces start from).

By mid-afternoon it looks dry enough to risk going out and we trek back across the boring part of town which divides the interesting bits into Hamra, taking (as is our wont) yet another new road. Every so often, on these walks, we pass a particularly badly damaged and derelict building which reminds us that we're in Beirut, but otherwise we've become very blazé about all the bullet-holes. We reach Tourist Information well before their closing time, but the staff seem to have just buggered off early - bastards: maybe it's a Ramadan thing. Because of Ramadan, the Opticians seem to close at 16.30 (just before sunset), so we hit them next and Milla places an order for a new contact lens: it should be in tomorrow, the guy tells her. Next we hit the photo shop, which may be run by Christians (or not-very-devout Muslims), since it doesn't seem to be intending to close for an iftaar break. Rather than dropping the films off to prints made, I stand with the woman at the machine and point out which ones we want: the 50-odd prints take about half an hour to do, which is nice and easy though we have a little argument about the price (the guy from Saturday promised us a discount on prints if we got the development/indexes done there).

There's a Pizza Hut just along the road which we look in just for a laugh - as expected, the prices are pretty horrendous (over $10 for a pizza with four toppings), but they have a buy-one-get-one-free offer on so hey - we eat there after all. Apart from us the place is pretty much deserted, so I guess the Lebanese don't like the pricing - or maybe it's just not chic enough.

A few notes on the streets of Beirut which spring to mind as we walk back (full) in the night. Firstly, and most irritatingly, are the taxis: cars are a great status symbol in Beirut, and the easiest way to show off wealth. As a result, no-one walks anywhere - especially not in areas where someone might see you. This is so much a part of the local mindset that you don't need to whistle or wave to hail a taxi, you just need to stop and stand still beside the road: a taxi (there are hundreds) will pull up within a few seconds. A corollary (I should be carrying a dictionary for spelling words like that) of this is that taxi drivers assume that anyone walking will actually want a taxi, and will sound their horn (often a few times) to let you know they're there. This has the unpleasant results that every walk in Beirut has the accompanying soundtrack of a continuous torrent of car horns being sounded at you (the loud Mercedes ones can be quite startling); and that every time you pause to cross a road, a taxi will pull up in front of you, normally blocking your route across.
A second, possibly related, phenomenon: pavements in Beirut are mostly not used by anyone (no-one walks, remember). So the council fills them up with stuff. A line of trees along a narrow pavement renders it quickly unusable (so you have to walk on the road, where taxis keep stopping next to you). Even in the rebuilt BCD, where they've put in nice wide pavements, they're gradually filling them with streetlights, ventilation exhausts, bins, trees, etc. They have this thing, by the way, for cutting trees into the shape of cubes (except palm trees, obviously, of which there are a lot at the shore).
A third note is that there are shiny new traffic lights all around Beirut, many with attached pedestrian crossings - these are actually deathtraps because most drivers don't stop at red lights. In the US I still get confused by the "Right on Red" policy, but here they have "Right, Left and Straight Forward on Red". About 20% of vehicles stop, just to make it that little bit more unpredictable, whereas another 20% don't even slow down but just sound their horns loudly and continuously as they approach: most seem surprised to see pedestrians actually crossing at the lights (since there are, as I've said, almost no pedestrians).
A final note is that the cast majority of cars on the streets are new, ie. only two or three years old - a big change from Syria and Turkey: most are German, with some French and Japanese, and a sizeable proportion are these big 4WD off-road things (which, frankly, just look stupid and pretentious in a country only 200x50km, or 120x30 miles: yes, Lebanon's that small - if it was square, it would only be 60x60 mils or 100x100 km). The oldest vehicles are the big old taxis (mostly Mercedes) - it's easy to imagine them shuttling journalists around the warzones, or hostages from safehouse to safehouse.

Back at the hotel/hostel there's been an influx of Japanese since we left, and the place is almost full. There's also an older Iraqi guy, an exile from a long time back, who has some interesting stories and a long-abiding fear of Iraqi undercover agents: he's most amused by our tale of the border and Milla's entry card ("Journalist? You want problems?"). Through the evening the staff provide free araq (revolting stuff - ouzo, raqi, absinthe) and apple nargile - a nice complement to the free tea and coffee which seems to flow through the day (if you stay in). We supplement it with beer from the local minimarket (still our best shopping option, though there are rumours of a large and nearby Spinneys) and reture late to watch TV and sleep.

We have a distinct feeling that we haven't really seen Beirut, even after three days here (mainly because we've stayed in a lot, and when we have gone out it's been mainly to shop): even so, it's time to start seeing the rest of Lebanon. Our determination and resolve is such that we don't actually set out uuntil just before midday - that shouldn't matter too much, as our destination is Jbail (Byblos or Gebal, depending if you're being Greek or Biblical), which is small and close and served from nearby Charles Helou bus station. Zaher gives me a note of a bus company who apparently do the run for 1,000LL per person, and off we go. The bus station is linear and straightforward, with separate areas for taxis, and for buses to Damascus, and for buses up the coast. We're unable to find any sign of Zaher's bus company, but there are a host of others all charging 1,500LL: it's a flat fare, up to Tripoli, regardless of where you get off. Bizarrely all of them claim they are a "direct" service to Tripoli, no stops, until we say we're going to Jbail - then they're all stopping at Jbail. With nothing to choose between them, we just pick the one which is leaving soonest, in ten minutes.
The bus ride is pretty uncomfortable, particularly for Milla, who has a problem with air-conditioning: the little nozzles above our seats (and most others) are broken, so there's no way of switching them off. She has a word with the driver twice, but that seems to have little effect - we also see several other passengers struggling with their equally broken vents.
Jbail is about 40km/25 miles north of Beirut and the entire coastal strip is heavily built up (we're on a motorway just back from the shore). First up, there's a long suburban strip of drive-throughs, large stores (we pass Spinneys - too far from the hotel to be any use), and neon signs (mostly in Latin characters) - this strip runs seamlessly into the supposedly up-market resort of Jounieh, which is all dodgy-looking nightclubs, high-rise hotels and the apparently famous casino. There are a couple of less densely populated areas, where the mountains come down almost right to the shore, but otherwise it's pretty much built-up all the way to Jbail. The bus drops us next to the town, we cross the highway, and are suddenly there.

"There" appears to be a little modern town with a small centre of little shops, a bank, a post office and so on: nothing worth mentioning. Reasoning that ancient Byblos would be at the shore, we follow the downhill streets and soon find ourselves walking along the perimeter of the archaeological site. The approach to the actual ticket office is along a row of little stalls selling the usual souvenir and resort stuff (postcards, guidebooks, flip-flops, handicrafts, etc.) and then we're at a little wooden shed where the guy lets us in for the student price of 1,500LL (rather than 6,000LL). From here we can either bear right towards a Troy-like jumble of walls, or go straight ahead over a high stone bridge into the Crusader castle: we choose the castle.
It's not much of a castle - essentially square with towers at each corner and one above the entrance, all around a central keep, it's more of a stone fort. Just inside is a museum which takes up much of the most complete towers: there are a few average exhibits, and lots of interesting information panels. It's a long and ancient site, datying back to the Neolithic - as in Antalya, locals seem to have buried their relatives in large jars (after they were dead). It was a Canaanite Egyptian satellite, prosperous for cedar timber exports, and developed into a major Phoenician centre ("Phoenicia" was the Greek name for the seafaring civilisation that developed from the Canaanites). Significantly it remained a major cultural site, critical in the diffusion of the Phoenician alphabet (precursor of the Greek and Latin alphabets - hence the Greek name Byblos, related to Greek for papyrus and book - as in Bible). Our favourite exhibit is a Phoenician alphabet decoder, for kids, which invites us to write our names in Phoenician. It was Persian for 200 years before Alexander, then Hellenised up to the arab/muslim conquest (637), which saw its long decline into a fishing village.

We explore the rest of the castle, the largest and most complete building in the site - it offers reasonable views but is too small to hold any of the passages, secret stairs, vaults or chapels which made Syria's Crusader castles so much fun. We leave at the north side and wander round the bottom to a nice stretch of paved Roman road: there are the foundations of a little nymphaeum here, where the road bent slightly to line up with the city gate. Further round (south-east), past a gap in the c.2,300BC ramparts which was apparently an ancient city gate, there's the remains of a large Persian (yes, Persian) castle: basically just a rectangle of square towers linked by curtain walls, but still the oldest castle we've seen. Winding past a large podium (with a lion relief on one corner) which seems to have formed part of the defences, we emerge inside the old city walls.

First up are a number of temples. The "Obelisk" Temple: very simple, fenced off, named because of the little obelisk-form votive offerings found there - more famous are little bronze figurines, some covered in gold, which feature on postcards, T-shirts and so on. Next up is the even more imaginatively-named "L-shaped" Temple - they found it underneath the Obelisk Temple (which they relocated): it has a few rooms of undiscernible purpose, dates to 2,700BC (pretty old, then), and . . . well, it's L-shaped. Lastly on the temple trail is the equally old Temple to Baalat Gebal (Baal is "Lord", Baalat is "Lady", Baal Shamin, as in Palmyre, is "Lord of the Heavens"). Originally a two-story flat-roofed building with ceremonial balcony (from which the priests presumably addressed the masses), over the millenia it ended up being converted into a Roman-style temple - there's still a little section of Roman road and columns visible, leading to it.

Just south of the temple is a hugely impressive hole in the ground: an irregular conical depression, it's like an inverse of the famous Tower of Babel painting. A giant cistern, at its centre is the Malik (King's) spring, ancient Byblos' source of fresh water. We clamber round it for a while, wander across to the dull foundations of some c. 3,700BC houses and then climb up to a Bronze Age (2,500BC?) temple and warehouse/palace/houses (they're not sure): they've excavated below here, but not found anything, so this was obviously on a natural hill which overlooked the whole settlement. It's sheltered round the back there, with the Mediterranean just beyond, so we spend a little time doing the kind of things you can only do when no-one else is watching, before pressing on.
At the extreme south-western corner of the site is the only modern building (c. 100 years old) here, now (after the various excavations) perched high on a little house-shaped ridge: round the back of it are some 5,000BC-3,000BC foundations. Heading north we come to a second big hold in the ground - this one's a sheer-sided rock quarry (after 2,000BC): there are a few walls, some modern, inside - but basically it's just a hole. Northwest of the hole is the theatre (also re-located by archaeologist - it used to be over by the temples). It is, without doubt, the funniest and most pathetic theatre we've yet seen: with only four rows of seating (which barely rise higher than the stage), it must have had a capacity of well under 100 (to be honest, it's apparently only a third the size of its former glory). In keeping with its size, the stage is nicely decorated with miniature columns.

The last part of ancient Byblos to see is the necropolis of royal tombs (from c. 1,800BC onwards): deep holes in the ground, some with entry passages from nearby pits, they're mostly fenced off. One of them is open and we clamber down for a look and are surprised to find a (block-like and undecorated) sarcophagus in situ - at least one of the others is in Beirut: I don't know where the others are (Istanbul, probably). After that we climb out over the ancient (c. 2,700BC) and more recent (c. 1,700BC) city walls and ramparts (sloped cobbles, in the glacis style), along the old castle moat and then out (after one last look at the site from the roof of an in-construction building - possibly a Visitor Centre-to-be).

We meet a guy at the gate who offers us a lift back to Beirut - we're pretty unsure, but we're also unsure what the bus schedule/service is like in the evening (remembering Syria): we say we'll meet him later at the church. It's beginning to get darker by now (half an hour to sunset), so we press up the hill to the (1115) Crusader Church of St. John (the Baptist). It's a defensible block from the outside, but a simple and graceful romanesque design insidee: the bell tower, outsided, ,is particularly elegant (it's possibly later), as is (appropriately) the baptistry - a little dome on square-based columns. We've had a look round before the guy with the car turns up, so we head down the hill towards the old town and little harbour. The streets in this quarter are all old stone buildings, cobbles, lush green gardens - it's very attractive in a Mediterranean way, like a miniature version of Antalya but without the huge city and resort: it's almost no surprise to find a Mexican Consulate tucked away here.

The old port, with a crumbling tower at the entrance, is now an upmarket marina (the dockside "Byblos Fishing Club" is apparently a famous hang-out of the rich and well-known). We sit on the harbour wall (passing a military checkpoint on the way), looking across the flats (rock and sand) and a few solitary anglers, as the sun sets over the Mediterranean. Then, as it starts to get colder, we head back uphill past the church - our guy is there, showing some French people around: he's obviously a guide. He'll be five minutes, he promises. Yeah, we say (deciding to go with him now that it's dark), and wait: he turns up ten minutes later, and off we go. Byblos the site gets 3/10: some interesting and unusual stuff, but not a great site - it's too small. Jbail the pretty little harbour/village also gets 3/10, 'cos it's kinda sweet (though a touch artificial).

Conversation on the journey is stilted (I have to pretend to be Romanian, due to the way we introduced ourselves), but quite interesting. Petrol, he claims, is way too expensive here (at 10p/$0.16) a litre!), but conversely thinks there are too many cars on the roads. The money for rebuilding Beirut/Lebanon, it turns out, has mostly come from Saudi Arabia (judging by the big cars and the price of property, a lot of this borrowed wealth has found its way elsewhere): he's unable to name anything which makes Lebanon enough money to allow them to pay it off, though strangely seems to think of Lebanon as a wealthy country. The war, he believes, was mostly caused by the arrival of the PLO (in a country still full of Palestinian refugees). On a related note, it seem Hezbollah blew up a McDonalds and a Pizza Hut a couple of weeks ago - this may explain why Pizza Hut had such a good offer, but was almost deserted: apparently all McDonald stores currently have a 24-hour military guard as a result.
From his point of view, he's far more interested in how easy it is to start a business in Romania, and in whether we want a guided tour arouund Baalbek tomorrow (we decide not). He drops us at Charles Helou, where we give him 3,000LL (he's sorely disappointed, but hey - it's the price of the bus) and walk back to the hotel.
Nothing much doing this evening except playing backgammon and chatting with our fellow guests.

We're both up before 08.00: I sit around until 10.30 in a curious and atypical fit of lethargy and depression, by which time it's too late to head for Saida (Sidon), our initial destination for today (there are two sites there we want to see). Milla phones the optician - it turns out he hasn't been able to get her lens, and offers her some free disposables of the same prescription instead. Then she eventually rouses me and gets directions from Zaher on how to get to Aanjar, a comparatively minor site, instead: we set out at 11.30. Our first step is to take a white city microbus (there are slower minibuses as well) to somewhere written in Arabic on a piece of paper. The microbuses have a pretty flat fare of 500LL per person: they slow down as they approach pedestrians - if you don't want them, you toss your head upwards, kinda arrogantly; otherwise you call out your destination - if the bus isn't going that way, the driver tosses his head up. As it happens, the first microbus that comes along takes us to our mystery destination, which turns out to be a junction from where longer-distance microbuses leave.

We catch one to Shtura, up into the hills, past all the churches in these suburbs and past lots of half-complete buildings (but not because they're unfinished - there's a lot of war damage here). Further up it gets pretty barren in the mountains, but at least there's a decent motorway after the first 18km (in theory fairly short, but that 18km takes ages because there's a lot of slow severely uphill sections): Milla sleeps for most of the journey. Shtura, when we get there, is all taxis and currency exchanges and gold shops (it's normally the first stop for traffic from Syria): we identify the turn-off for Baalbek, make sure we walk past it (don't want to go that way today) and try to find transport to Aanjar. There are a few microbuses and service taxis, but they're all quite expensive: eventually we hop on a passing bus which says (the driver, that is) it'll take us to the turn-off. The journey is only a few flat kilometres, effectively only crossing the Bekaa Valley: it drops us in front of a sign which says "Welcome in Aanjar" in Latin, Arabic, and Armenian characters.
We walk along the half-finished road, past a checkpoint, and get picked up by a little passing bus: 'Aanjar?' we ask, he nods, we get in. We drive about 200m and then stop outside an internet café in a little village just off the highway - we don't understand why: possibly to work out a price (the driver has no English). A man from the internet place comes out and translates: this is Aanjar, it turns out. The guy with the bus leaves, doubtless disappointed that we don't actually need his services,a nd our new friend starts telling us all the other trhings to see here apart from the Umayyad site. It's a very "please see my town" speech (it's actually a pretty desolate village - attractions included restaurants and a roundabout), and he seems disappointed that we're only here for the afternoon (presumably if we were staying over, we'd have nothing to do in the evening except spend it in his internet place). He gives us detailed instructions to the site: five minutes to explain "turn right, just there, and then go straight on", ie. for one junction. We walk 100m (back) to the indicated junction, turn right, pass a little row of houses and the "Assed Istamboulian Garage" (kinda confirming the Armenian presence here - street signs are also in Armenian characters), and then we're there. There's a big old wall in front of us, surrounding a complex the same size and shape as a Roman fort - the entrance turns out to be on the far side. They guy at the gate there won't give us a discount unless we're Lebanese students (again), so we cough up the fairly hefty 6,000LL and then we're in.

The Umayyad town, not a perfect square at 310x370m (ie. a ratio of 4:5), is built on pretty flat ground and is still entirely walled (though in most places the walls are thinner and/or lower than when they were originally): there are thick circular towers at each corner, tower-like mini-bastions every 36m, and a gate exactly in the middle of each side. Two colonnaded streets (a N-S cardo and an E-W documanus) link the gates, and there's a tetrapylon at the junction: yep, it's very Roman (which is odd, because this area was firmly Byzantine by the time the Arabs got here). Founded in c. 710 it was a trade centre built on the Damascus-Coast and Rift Valley (Orontes-Dead Sea) roads, and is significant because it was abandoned in Umayyad times (pretty much within 50 years of its construction) and not built over again, so it's about the best-preserved Umayyad site (rather than single building) anywhere.
Unsure which gate we've entered through (the brochure's in French, and the map's not oriented to north - it shows about 40% of the site in superb detail, but just white space for the rest), we turn right and wander along the inside of the wall (actually looking for a toilet - the first corner tower suffices). This quarter, obviously the town is divided into quarters) is pretty much entirely residential: arranged in six blocks, with occasional lanes, the presumably originally two-storey buildings are a mix of little 3- or 4-room places and larger 8- or 9-room-with-little-courtyard places. The surviving walls are only a couple of feet high, and we quickly get bored and head back east to the cardo.

The majority of columns are still standing on both the main streets, and in many places are still surmounted by arches (as opposed to flat Roman-style lintels): just behind the rows of columns are single-cell shops (like in the souqs of Damascus or Aleppo), running the entire length of the site. They're built in blocks, in alternating layers of large white cut stone and layers of Roman/Byzantine terracotta-coloured bricks (this layering was cheap and quick to build, and more resilient to earthquakes). According to the brochure there are 600 shops in Aanjar, which would be an incredible number for a place this size/population - we reckon there's only 200-250, but that's still tons.

We follow the cardo up to the tetrapylon which marks the centre of town (4x4 type, partially restored) and also where all the significant buildings were located. On the north-east corner is the "Little Palace" - it has a nice courtyard, some ornate stonework, steps leading up to nowhere (the walls here are 1m-3m high) and, interestingly, a little carved cross on one side of the entrance: it's very Byzantine (which would have been my guess if I hadn't known it was Umayyad). We cross to the north-west corner and look at the equivalent building there, which they tentatively describe as possibly a third palace: it looks much more like a Khan to us (simpler in execution, with a wider gate as if for vehicles, and much smaller cell-like rooms around the courtyard).
Saving the south-east corner with its mosque and "Grand Palace" for later, we head up to the best-preserved east gate. We find an open gate here in the fence that runs all the way round the site (which we could doubtless have walked through for free, but I guess the guy from the ticket office would have come and nabbed us) and just beyond is a Syrian checkpoint: it's all painted with Syrian flags, there's a big wall-poster of the presidents and a guy in Syrian uniform with a gun - it's like being back in Syria. It's illegal to photograph checkpoints, of course, but we push past heavy vegetation and find steps up to the top of one of the Umayyad towers and take a surreptitious shot - the soldier's unfortunately vanished (maybe it's prayer time) and although we waited during a cigarette and packet of biscuits, he doesn't return.

We return to the centre past more shops (at the east end several are still roofed) and nip into the mosque: filled with rows of columns, it's a big long hall with a raised central section/podium - much like the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus (but smaller), and much like any early Byzantine basilica-church (with a mihrab instead of an apse). Exiting out the back/south side, we cross a little lane to the largest and most impressive building in Aanjar, the Grand Palace. Much of the taller sections here are actually resurrected - there's a section of high wall with arched windows, on one side of a large central courtyard - there are also a few rows of arches, some double (stacked), from the larger flanking halls - they're pretty imposing, even with very little else standing around them. It's still not particularly big, though there's some nice architectural detail on the stonework (the walls are the same alternate layers of brick and stone).

We pick up a dog at the palace, which escorts us out and up towards the south gate: bizarrely there are people living here, in the still-roofed shops. Exclusively male, we guess they might be Syrian army - they have washing lines strung up between the columns, a waterpump in the middle of the cardo, and from them we learn that the dog is called Stella. Stella also escorts us as we clamber around the overgrown south-western quarter (all residential), failing to lose her as we take difficult wall-top routes. She's still with us as we explore the tumbled western gate and towers, and is joined by a second dog when we return to the tetrapylon for a photo. A man with a shotgun approaches us, but only to say hello rather than to shoot us (for climbing on the tetrapylon, for example), but we decide to leave anyway. We detour by the baths (again, very Byzantine - that seems a fair summary of what we've seen of Umayyad architecture today), where there's not much to see except some rooms with the remains of hypocaust flooring.

As we exit the site (there's a film crew near the gate) Stella leaves us; the other dog stays slightly longer, but abandons us before we turn back towards the Damascus-Beirut highway. Aanjar gets 3/10 - quite nice, but nothing special. It's getting close to sunset, so we don't know what our transport options will be - there should be transport back from Shtura, we figure, but Shtura's 15km away. We've only walked for ten minuets before a guy in a blue pick-up stops for us - he can take us on to the next village. He drops a fellow liftee (?) at a nearby farm and then suggests we have iftaar at his home - it's only ten minutes to sunset and, without any English, he manages to pass on the information that there ain't gonna be any buses now.

We agree (Milla has her doubts) and he takes us to a little concrete two-floor farmhouse about 2km off the main road: inside are his wife and his (we think) sister and, on a wide cloth on the floor enough food for at least six people. There are also six glasses laid out, which implies that he regularly invites people back, or possibly it's a tradition to set the table (floor) as if expecting guests. We don't know and, since no-one here speaks English, we're unlikely to find out. The television (in the corner) goes on - it's a picture of a big mosque, with someone chanting, and at the appropriate point everyone suddenly starts eating. There's yoghurt, and various stews, and stuffed vines, and chips, and Pepsi or Mirinda to drink, and a copious quantity of flat bread (no cutlery - you just scoop and roll a little bit of bread into a mini-parcel). Even with five of us (instead of three) we only get through 60% of what was laid out. Then everyone retires to seats (floor cushions against the walls) around the ancient wood-burning stove for coffee and fruit (we're also offered mini-plastic-wrapped criossants, but non-one else is eating them so we don't).
More people turn up: two women about Belal's (he's Belal, by the way, whom I thought was an ancient god - also he's Syrian, though living in Lebanon) wife's age (his and her sisters . . . perhaps); and a younger girl (who quickly retires to 30cm from the TV screen); and his parents, separately: a space is made right next to the stove for his mother, and his father greets us, shaking my hand and expertly dropping his sleeve when he shakes Milla's so he doesn't touch her skin. The men leave to the mosque (Belal mimes praying, to explain). They're away from 17.15 to 18.15, while the women stay and chat and snack and watch TV and stare at me: they're particularly taken by my blue eyes. With the aid of the phrasebook and miming, we communnicate about family relations (we think we've got them figured out, but later discover we came away with different conclusions as to who as who's sister), and about weddings (we see photos - Belal's wife has doubled in girth in the last year) and ages - they're all incredibly young (teens and early twenties). The old woman turns out to be best at understanding us (from our gestures and mispronounced words, and from guessing what we might be trying to say): she's also demoniacally good with a knife, casually peeling and perfectly slicing apples without even looking - she leaves, before the men return, with a plastic bag full of food.
After returning from prayers, the men (in particular) are quite insistent that we should sleep over as guests (Belal's father most so), despite our almost complete mutual incomprehension: we tell them that we have friends waiting in Beirut, though, and at 18.45 Belal takes us up the road (via a petrol station - we try to pay, but he won't hear of it: he also gets the Latin-character-writing attendant to write down his name and village for us). At the road he helps us flag down a service taxi to Shtura (the driver optimistically suggests "Beirut? $20?") and waves us off. At Shtura we pretty much step straight onto a microbus for Beirut: presumably desperate to get there quickly, one of our fellow passengers is rounding up people to fill the seats and it's hardly any time before we're off. The bus takes us close to where we left from this morning, and just up the hill from there we catch a local microsbus all the way back to the hotel.

We watch some football for a bit (there's an Arab/Middle East cup going on, and Syria are thrashing Lebanon today), and check our email (Tina's not well). There are a lot of Japanese around, including one guy (he's dyed his hair blond and insists on wearing Bedouin-style clothing which he presumably picked up locally) who's carrying a guitar with him: he's learning to play it on this trip. Judging by what we hear, it's only a few days since he left Japan. There's also an old (49) Japanese guy, with lots of bags, who seems to have been travelling for ages: the younger Japanese treat him with lots of respect, despite the smell.
We retire early, listening to bad guitar-playing into the night.

We're up early (07.20 and 07.30) and out just after 09.00, heading for Saida ("side-ah", ancient Sidon): a local microbus takes us to the Cola junction, in the south-west corner of Beirut, which functions as a de facto bus terminal in the same way that Dora junction in the north used to before they built Charles Helou bus station. We're almost instantly on another white microbus heading south along the coast. This half of Lebanon seems much less built-up, and we're passing occasional stretches of greenery almost as soon as we leave Beirut past the airport. The route is mainly in and out of little coastal towns and villages and through fields of fruit trees (mandarins and blue plastic-wrapped bananas): eventually we pass a big new sports stadium on the shore, suburbs of new concrete blocks, and then come to the centre of town - Saida turns out to have a proper, if small, bus station a couple of blocks up from the shore.

One of the great Phoenician cities, Sidon was a great naval centre for the Persians (not noted for their native prowess on the high seas), capitulated to Alexander without a fight and remained important until a gradual decline under the Byzantines and Arabs. From 1111 it was a major Crusader site until ther eventual (1291) defeat, after which the Mamlukes destroyed the sea-castle and rebuilt the rest of the town. Despite a few well-plundered necropoli, there's not a lot to see except the Mamluke old town: the Phoenician temple complex of Eshmoun, nearby, and two Crusader castles.
We hit the shore at a little beach, dirty (like the sea in the bay) and covered in litter. To the north we can see a longer beach which doesn't look much cleaner; to the south is the old Crusader sea-castle. Built on a tiny island just off the shore (an ex-temple site), it's linked by a more modern bridge lined with old cannon: we go in after using the free toilets in the car-park opposite and have a little argument as we cross (about Milla having a little argument with the ticket man - she feels she should have got a studeent discount). The outer walls, like most Crusader castles we've seen, re-use old Roman masonry and marble/granite columns (for support), especially towards the bottom: inside is unusual because the outer (narrow) bailey is all sand (and sandflies) underfoot, like a fortified beach.

The castle comprises two ruined towers (of two or three large rooms each), a wall and courtyard linking them, and the scant remains of a couple of vaulted halls abutting the towers (the design was kinda like a ship - high at the ends, with a long and low middle section). We enter through the north tower, where seawater erosion has left some of the walls suspended about the water (held in place by their cement), and cross the courtyard (open on the sea-facing side, so it presumably served as a little dock: beyond are rocky flats) to the better-preserved south tower. There's a superb, multi-level first floor hall here, with steps up to a lower roof (for barbecues?) and an upper roof (good views), and we quite decide we'd like to have a house like this some day (on the Mediterranean, obviously). The north tower isn't as much fun: we find the ticket inspector and a soldier sitting in the little one-room mosque (the only complete room at this end), and there's a good broken column stub on the ground floor next to the courtyard. Small but nice, I give Saida sea castle its own mark - 2/10 on the ruins scale.

Just inland from the castle is Saida's souq, a cozy little bustling warrne of stalls selling normal products (eg. plastic household goods, rather the gold) and packed with locals, so obviously still a major shopping venue. We emerge at the old Foreigners' Khan (Khan al-Faranj), large and squarish and reminiscent of Hanul lui Manuc in Bucuresti, though smaller and built entirely from stone (which makes it seem a bit bare/barren). It's pretty much unused, though they're renovating rooms: we find Tourist Information there (where we pick up more English-language leaflets, and the woman tells us that Eshmoun is only "two minues" north of town, even without a car) and a hall with information boards on all the archaeological and restoration work that's taken place in Saida.

From there we walk along the shore south, past the fish market (smelly, filthy and populated by one fat cat and hundreds of flies), and via a huge doubling-back eventually come to the Great Mosque. Originally a Hospitaller church, the outer walls still date back to the Crusader period - now apparently partly occupied by a school, the inner complex is a courtyard flanked on three sides by carpetted, cloister-like awnings and with a completely-walled prayer hall on the south side. It's elegant and peaceful, though the guys there seem surprised to see visitors (it was quite tricky to find): one man comes over and points out the perfectly hemispherical domes in the ceilings.
The mosque is very close to the old inland Crusader castle of St. Louis - much larger, but more derelict than the sea castle, we can see the "land castle" behind a high fence. Enquiries of locals reveal that the entrance is on the far side, and we head into an amazing, confusing, twisting trail of little sometimes-vaulted medieval alleys and lanes. There are open doors from time to time and we see bakers at work, and furniture-makers (hopefully not using Cedar wood), and a variety of other trades all being carried out in seemingly chaotic little workshops. We come out the other side and discover that even from here we can't get in because the gate's locked. There doesn't seem to be anyone around, and there are a couple of gaps in the high fence, but there's quite a drop on the other side (which we'd have to climb up to get out), and frankly the castle just looks like an overgrown pile of masonry. So we leave it.

Instead we set off along the straight modern road towards Eshmoun, pausing to price sticky pastry (ouch - $6 a kilo!) and for a couple of shwarmas (yes, shwarma on sale during the day in Ramadan, from a little place near the bus station, opposite a mosque!). Just past the shwarma place we spot a bizarre restaurant called "Al Pacino": not only is it bizarre due to being named after an actor with no connection to food, but it's not even an Italian restaurant - it's "Al Pacino Fried Chicken".
Leaving the stone-built old town, the road joins a more major palm-lined dual carriageway running beside the long, dirty beach (there are three or four people on it). After ten minutes' walking, we ask locals where Eshmoun is: they either don't know, or else keep pointing us further along the road. After a quarter of an hour, nearing the outskirts of town, we turn inland (Eshmoun, we know, is slightly inland): as we pass the outer town-signs, a guy from a fruit stall directs us still further out. The woman at Tourist Information, we recall, not only said "two minutes", but she also said the site was inside Saida - "fucking bitch" we chant as we walk: obviously she'd never been here, or else she was drugged at the time.
Walking along a lane parallel to the main coastal road, between fields of mandarin trees, we see more evidence of the war (there were only a few bullet holes in the walls in Saida): a wall beside the lane has holes in it for snipers, overlooking the main road. Eventually, after most of an hour and only one wrong turn, we reach the tiny little gate into the tiny little site. There's an armed soldier in a little concrete room here, with a metal-frame bed inside, and there's no charge to go in and look around.

Eshmoun, now ringed by fields (the site actually contains a little house and an orange grove - Milla already has a supply from outside) was effectively an Asklepion: a health-spa and temple to Eshmoun (local health god), it's the only Phoenician-era site with more to see than foundations. The main temple was already ruined by the time of Alexander, but the site remained in use until Byzantine times. In fact we enter past a barely-recognisable Byzantine church (this is a site requiring a lot of imagination), and pretty much straight onto a Roman colonnaded street.
Just before the street are buildings on our left and right (a former nymphaeum), both with the remains of mosaics on the floors: just left out in the open and really old (3rd century BC), they're in a pretty bad way and almost crumbling before our eyes. Neither fenced off not covered in any protective coating, they must be a little more damaged with almost every tourist that comes through. Eshmoun is built against a hill and Roman steps on our right (decorated with geometric mosaics) lead up to a Babylonian-era (c. 550BC) artificial podium: just beyond, and dominating the site, is a far more massive and far more intact podium built about a hundred years later.
Back down on the flat (you can't really get anywhere from the podium) we search in vain for the "shrines with bull protomes" mentioned in the brochure (they're supposed to be at the bottom of the steos): it probably doesn't help that we don't know what "protomes" are, but all we find area couple of large free-standing stone blocks and nothing bull-like. We walk along the Roman steets (with only residential ruins to the left) to the main cluster of buildings. First up are tiers of now partially collapsed seats - there are channels and basins here, so it was presumably somewhere to sit and take the waters.

Adjacent to these seats is the stone-lined Pool of Astarte (a Phoenician goddess): against the back wall is a large seat (with flanking sphnixes - in that style they're known generically as "Thrones of Astarte"), presumably ceremonial since it's too big for either of us to sit in comfortably. We use the massive fallen blocks as stepping stones across the pool since, after the recent rains, the ground inside is pretty marshy. Next door to the pool is a large, contemporaneous (3rd century BC again) temple, of which little remains except the outline and some ancient reliefs on the north (street-facing) wall. Round the corner, past a wonderful collection of bits on the ground (reliefs, carved capitals and so on), we come to the ritual basins and the network of water channels (fed from a cistern high up on the hill) which kept the place going. THe entire site is littered with little canals, and there were presumably a bunch of sluice gates to direct the flow.

We admire some geometric mosaics stacked casually against a back fence and, in the fading light, return to the start of the site. From the brochure, on closer inspection, we've got a photo of the "bull protome" - it's a white, carved capital which used to sit on top of the blocky stone shrin: I say "used to" since it ain't there now. It seems horribly likely that someone nicked it during the war and sold it to buy more guns. Worse are the mosaics - we have a photo of one of the four Seasons: in reality we can identify it by the border only, since all that remains of a fairly complete figure is the tip of a wing and a bunch of grapes. Sections of the underlying base are still there, and it seems clear than (despite the optimistic and clearly out-of-date brochure) the mosaic's been effectively destroyed sometime recently, either during or after the war. Great.

Somewhat depressed (Eshmoun only gets 1/10: it's small and there's really not a lot left) we leave the site just before sunset and take a more direct route back to the highway, along the leafy banks of a pleasant river (a rarity in the Middle East). We come out at a serious checkpoint (the woman at Tourist Information mentioned a checkpoint in her directions) with sandbags and gun-emplacements: more a defensible position than a "checkpoint", it seems designed to slow down a convoy of invading tanks. We walk up to a petrol station and from there flag down a microbus back to Beirut's Cola junction, where we wait at a number of different corners but fail to find a bus to Charles Helou. It seems, as optimistic taxi drivers tell us, that the city bus service (or at least that line) stops running at about 18.00
Since it's not raining and not cold, we walk back to the hotel instead (it takes about an hour, through parts of the city we haven't seen before), where we fortify ourselves with instant-ish soup and check our email (Milla gets the true story of the "spontaneous" crowds that turned out for President Bush's recent visit - no surprises there). I sleep while Milla watches TV - Forensic Detectives (one of her favourites) and the film Chocolat. She goes to sleep about 01.00, after which I wake shortly after, have a cigarette, eat a Mars bar, sneeze a lot and go to bed at 02.00.

I'm up at 07.00, shower and so on: Milla's up at 09.00, and by 10.00 it's raining so we decide (kinda by default) not to do anything today. We also review what we have to see in Lebanon and figure that, even though we haven't seen that much, there's not actually that much to see. There's still the National Museum and the AUB campus here in Beirut; the huge cave of Jeitta Grotto near Beirut, though we have our doubts about that - it's apparently expensive and popular with locals, and just a cave; Tripoli, Bsharré and the famous Cedars in the north of the country; the temple site of Baalbek in the Bekaa valley; to the south we've decided against the palaces at Beiteddine (everyone who's been says they're dull)and Beaufort Castle (the Israelis, who occupied it until a couple of years ago, apparently blew up half of it when the left, for "security" reasons), but there's still Tyre. Hopefully we can make a more determined effort over the next few days.
Milla sleeps for a few hours while I write, then we both watch a bit of TV until she decides to go out at 15.15 to visit the optician and collect her free lenses. I spend time on the internet and chat generally: Zaher, incidentally, has an ongoing grgudge against Lonely Planet - in the last Lebanon guide they apparently said his place was full of Syrian men and that female travellers would feel uncomfortable there. He's complained and threatened to sue them: they've meanwhile visited since them and have a better write-up - but the next Lebanon edition won't be out for a couple of years.
Before I know it it's 17.30 and there's no sign of Milla - her round trip, which should have taken 80-90 minutes has taken 130+: a little worried I go out to look for her, even though the odds of me finding her somewhere in Beirut are almost nil. I find her in the BCD, after ten or fifteen minutes (there was some delay at the opticians) and, armed with slightly contradictory sets of directions, we decide to find Spinney's (apparently there's one much closer than the one we saw on the Jbail road). It turns out to be fifteen minutes from the hotel, a real supermarket, and mysteriously has a lot of Tesco stuff (so that's good). We leave with bars of white chocolate, a Cadbury's Caramel and other goodies and get back to the hotel at 20.45, where we continue pigging out on pasta and beer.

Later on Milla checks her email (Tina's on the fourth visit to the vet already), and checks her new lenses (they're too big, ,goddam - ah well: they were free), and then she sleeps while I write (the notebook's back in Damascus, as it were). The evening's excitement is provided by the weather - the wind almost tears off one of the shutters on our window, and Zaher decides the only solution to stop it crashing down on pedestrians (or through the window) is to remove it by brute force. Gosh - Beirut, city of storms.
Incidentally, we've also learned the story of the Syrian presidents' faces: the cool-looking army guy was number one son, but died in a car "accident" shortly after taking office. The geeky-looking guy with the squint face is number two son, and the current president.

A new notebook started today and, as with last time, I'm several days behind in the previous one - this is due to a number of factors, primary among which is travelling with someone (I spend free time with Milla, rather than writing), though the general lack of rainy days (during which I'm inclined to hide indoors and write) also contributes.
Today's a bit of a disaster: despite getting up at 07.30 (Milla at 08.00), there are issues in the hotel after our breakfast and cigarettes. These are mainly shower issues with Milla (who's decideed she must have a shower this morning, despite not taking one all day yesterday when we had nothing to do): some friendly and helpful soul switched off the boiler in the main bathroom, so there's only cold water there. There's a delay while the problem is identified, and then Milla moves to the smaller bathroom next to our room. She returns in a sulk claiming there's no pressure (I check - there is): at this point, while she's dittering between bathrooms, I give up on the whole concept of getting out in time to do either of today's options (Baalbek or Tyre), since they're both further away than anything we've attempted as a day-trip from here so far: I put in some internet time instead.
After another half an hour, Milla arrives dressed and ready to go out and I discover that some bastard's nicked my Turkish plastic lighter - and it was lying on a table less than 2 metres from where I was typing. Fucking arabs. Or possibly fucking Japanese - the hotel's full of them. It takes me fifteen or twenty minuets to check I haven't just left it somewhere else, and then I take one from the hotel stock (manual and disposable - the old one may have been cheap and plastic, but it wasn't that cheap). And then, finally and very late (11.00), we set out for Sour ("Soor", ie. Tyre) - me, I'd kinda given up on doing it today (it's about as far from Beirut as you can go and still be in Lebanon), but Milla's energised. We take a microbus to Cola, but the friendly driver (once he learns where we're going) takes us a little bit further to where direct microbuses are leaving from (ie. avoiding a change at Saida).

We're on a bus almost instantly, and on the road within a couple of minutes: after the usual crawl through the outskirts to find more passengers, the bus does good time and takes about an hour to reach Saida, where we discover that we actually do have to change bus. The scenery past Saida turns out to be much like the scenery around Saida - much flatter than at Beirut, and mostly given over to huge citrus and banana groves (as we saw around Saida, the bananas are wrapped in protective blue plastic bags). Also the shiny new roads don't extend this far south, and there's a lot more heavily-armed and serious checkpoints - it was much more recently that this area saw fighting, after all. There's also a lot more UN vehicles and personnel arounnd, in their little white Landrovers. There are a lot of stops with locals (including a lot of families and little kids) getting on and off, and we eventually reach Sour at almost 13.15. Goddam - hopefully there's not much to see. The little microbus goes right into the centre of the old town and drops us opposite the little old harbour.
We're back on the Alexander trail here, in ancient Tyre. Like other Phoenician cities, even when unnder the control of foreign empires (Assyria or Persia or Egypt), it consisted of an island city facing the shore. After a seven-month siege (Tyre was the only Phoenician city to resist), Alexander famously used his siege engines/catapults to create a causeway across to the island and then storm it. Through the combined action of building and silting, that causeway is now 500m wide and old Tyre is pretty much built on the resultant peninsula.

The ruins here are in three different locations: two sets on the old island (imaginatively called Areas 1 and 2, or al-Mina) and the third (Area 3, or al-Bass) on the old mainland where most of the later Roman city grew up. We head south along a little shopping street and are soon passing the smallest Area 2, which seems to be totally fenced in. Over the road from it is the much larger Area 1 - the archeological site contains about 25% of the old island! We get in with no discount (pah) and find ourselves on a colonnaded street running straight down to the shore. It's interesting for a couple of reasons, one of which is the unusual coloured marbles they've used for some of the columns. Also interesting is the nice geometric mosaic which used to comprise the roadway - I say "used to" because at some point they (bizarrely) overlaid it with marble tiles. The current state of the street has remnants of both. A number of the buildings around us are from mixed types of stone and, oddly, one of these is a very soft white limestone/chalk which is now much more rounded and eroded than the rest. Milla guesses that they're reconstructed sections, but many are low-down and only partially-excavated, so they must be original - possibly they served some purpose (salt-proofing? damp-proofing?), or were merely decorative.

The northern (inland) end of the site has a couple of side streets leading off, and shortly after that is a very curious rectangular arena which we walk around. Surrounding the remaining seats are rows and rows of single-cell rooms of some indiscernible purpose - they were under the upper tiers of seats, unless the arena had a tiny capacity. I figure they must have been part of the foundations for the upper seating; Milla thinks they're tombs - we're probably both wrong. Behind the arena is a large semi-excavated area, still sporting the narrow-gauge tracks used to carry the soil away as they dug.

On the other side of the street is an extensive baths complex with a colonnaded palaestra outside. Just after that, the road reaches the current shore - in the shallow bay ahead we can see stretches of now-underwater walls and semi-submerged (Phoenician) breakwaters. There's a guy at the shore who explains that most of the ancient city is now underwater - co-incidentally, he's collected a number of coins and artefacts from beneath the waves: would we like to see them? No thanks, we say, and continue our wander round the shore, striking inland past a solitary sarcophagus and clambering across the other side of the baths (just foundations and hypocaust flooring visible now, but quite extensive). We check out the other streets and buildings adjacent to the gate, but the guys who let us in shout at us when we (Milla) climb over the little rope fence and start clambering around (there are some interesting column remnants), so we leave.

Time is pressing, due to our late start, but we decide to have a quick wander around the outside of Area 2 - it turns out that there's a gate open further round (opposite a working men's club, with photos of suicide bombers outsided the door - we think). There are two obvious ruins here, plus a host of unidentifiable walls, courtyards and bits of roadway. Superimposed on top of each other at the south-west corner of the site are a Roman colonnaded street and the Crusader cathedral lying diagonally on top of it. We have a wander and climb about and then leave, heading inland to the largest of the three sites.

The al-Bass site borders the city centre, which is good, but unfortunately the official entrancee is on the far side, so we have a 30/40 minute walk to get there, along the shore and then through what are probably best described as outskirts. We finally get there at about 15.30 and the guy at the gate lets us in with a warning that they close at 16.30. Great. What's even worse than the time pressure is that the al-Bass site is instantly and obviously both extensive and excellent.

We're starting at the necropolis to the east of the old city walls and our first building is an excellent little Byzantine house complete with little arched doors and a shrine and so on - you could almost just put a roof on it and live there. We head west along the old Roman road - the tombs on either side of the road are just as well-preserved as the little house was, and there are hundreds of them. There are carved sarcophagi, and family plots with shrines and little mosaiced courtyards, and intact roofed maussolea with shelves for coffins/sarcophagi and occasional little heaps of human bones. There are so many sarcophagi and funerary monuments here that it gives a real impression of what the necropolis would have looked like in Roman times, and it's better than the ones we've already seen in Hierapolis or Assos. Unfortunately time is really tight thanks to this morning's late start, and we have to skip looking at most of them.

We enter the city proper through a huuge triple-arched gate (which seems largely original) and continue along the Roman street (with intact Roman paving), flanked on our left by the remains of the aqueduct which was Roman Tyre's water supply. Directly to our left as we walk further is the hippodrome - it's largely intact (inasmuch as a big U-shaped field can be said to be "intact"), with remnants of the seating going all the way rouund, the main entry gate at the far end, and gates/arches along the sides as well. There are a couple of sections of seating still upright (at least one of which looks heavily restored), and when the rain begins to fall heavily we try to use them as shelter as we work our way up to the very far end - fairly unsuccessfully, since this is very determined rain. The rain is so heavy that we're both totally soaked within a few seconds, though we still hide for a bit under the big gate at the far end. The downpour starts to ease eventually and we dash back along the racecourse (or at least walk briskly - it's a long track), noting that it seems to have been paved (that's a surprise).

Back at the far (road) end of the hippodrome, we see a number of further ruins (churches, houses and so on - some with stretches of surviving mosaic in situ). We also see a number of old arabs walking across the site with bags of shopping, which kinda implies that there are other ways into the site than the entrance gate. It's about 16.30 and pretty much sunset, so we decide (after walking along more of the partially-excavated and very long Roman street) to just follow one of the worn paths and see where it takes us. It takes us to a rip in the fence which we duck through into a residential area of blocks: a couple of streets away, we thankfully come to somewhere much more central (with shops and lights). There's a little eatery/take-away on the corner called "Abou Deeb", which sounds like a character from Dune or at least a robot from Star Wars - so we decide to stop and eat there. It's just gone sunset, so there's a mob around the place (how's that for a title - "Happy Times for Abou Deeb"): most of the mob turned out to be there because the place just isn't geared up for the iftaar rush - they don't have the capacity. Even after paying and joining the queue, it takes ten minutes before we get our average shwarmas.
We return to the square where the bus dropped us this morning, but there's nothing happening there (it's the post-sunset dead time) so we wander up the shore past the twee fishing harbour and into the "Christian Quarter" (apparently) of confusing, twisting little alleys (passing through the mostly-closed little souq on the way). In this area we find the oldish but boring Archbishopric of Tyre (lots of people there, particularly teenagers) and at the very point (in the pitch darkness) an old ruined tower (possibly a former lighthouse?), some shallow rocks, and a man sitting and fishing in the waves. We both quite like Tyre, particularly this area, and despite the weather (though the rain is actually holding off at the moment).
We walk back (passing yet more little UN offices and white Landrovers - they have a heavier presence the further south you go) into the central square/carpark/bus-stop area (flanked at one end by the disappointing "Byzantine Monument", which seems to be a monument to Byzantine times rather than something 1500 years old - unless its been really heavily restored). Miraculously there's an old minibus which claims to be going to Beirut for almost no money. With perfect timing it begins to rain again as we sit in the bus while the driver and his friends try to round up more passengers. The excellent spread of ruins in Tyre get 4/10, as does the town itself: the only downside was that we arrived so late in the day and had so little time - we could have easily spent another couple of hours there.

The minibus, of course, only takes us as far as Saida where we have time for a cigarette before boarding a regular microbus to Beirut - it drops us at the Cola roundabout where we try to treat ourselves to a Pizza Hut (there's one right there): their two-for-one offer (the only reason we're there) seems to have become for takeaway/delivery only, though, so we don't. Instead, knowing the crap local bus situation and since it's dry here, we walk back to Talal's via Spinney's supermarket where (as well as buying a present for Tina) we also pick up cigarettes and chocolate. Milla also nips into another nearby supermarket to buy a roll of film for tomorrow (which should be Baalbek) since I've pretty much run out.
And then back to our room and to bed.

We're up between 06.45 and 07.00 (no lazy Sunday for us), breakfast is coffee and rolls (with cheese, yoghurt and mustard), and we're out early: it's astounding - almost as if we've become another us! We're on a city bus just after 09.00 and on a bus to Baalbek shortly after (though we have to sit and wait while it half-fills up). The journey takes an hour and three-quarters, over the mountains to Shtura and then up the Bekaa Valley (famous for Hezbollah and opiates) to Baalbek.

The microbus drops us just up the hill from the very obvious ruins, but we still manage to take the wrong road to get to them. We meander past two innacessible fields of other ruins, and eventually complete three long sides of a trapezoidal road layout before coming to the entrance to the temple complex. It's a proper site entrance, with turnstiles and the works (and a student discount, though still $5) and then we're at the bottom of a large flight of wide steps. Where do they go? Up. Actually they lead to a massively wide (though not deep) propylaea (entrance hall), flanked by two tall towers: the back is pretty much solid wall with three large doorways, while the front is columned. Looking back down the steps we can see that the bottom was actually set in a large courtyard ringed with steps or seats.

Pressing inwards (we can see the few surviving columns of the temple proper well ahead of us) takes us into a hexagonal courtyard which is a bit collapsed now - some modifications took place in Byzantine times, including filling in some bits, popping a dome on top and using it as a church. It's an unusual shape, and jumbled now, so it's difficult to imagine what it originally looked like. Through from this hexagonal courtyard (where there are a small number of people trying to sell souvenirs and guided tours) is a much larger square courtyard (well, roughly square): on three sides there are rows of columns and porticoes in large niches, alternately rectangular and semi-circular, which seem to have contained two rows of statues: on the fourth side, of course, are the steps leading up to where the main temple building once stood.

Also in this artificially-flat courtyard are two solitary columns (one red, one grey - we've seen that before, but still don't know what it signifies), a couple of higher towers (one of which was apparently used as an altar) and two ornamental pools (presumably for ritual washing). Some of the decorative relief work around the pools is unfinished, presumably deliberately (like on some sarcophagi we've seen - it was the fashion for a while). There are also a couple of archaeological trenches in the courtyard, and there used to be the remains of a church here (they dismantled it to get to the Classical stuff). By the time we've finished looking round this second courtyard, we've been overtaken by a couple of tour groups - they, together with the little independent clusters of two to six people, make Baalbek comfortably the busiest site we've seen in Lebanon and one of the busiest since Turkey (after Palmyra).

Finally we ascend the steps (they have a big gap in the middle, where the apse of the church used to be - ie. facing west, like the temple, rather than east) to the main building - the Temple of Jupiter. Not only the largest-known Roman Temple it also has the largest-known Roman columns: standing beside some of the fallen columns, their diameter makes them higher than I am (see the photo at the top of this page). Unfortunately the building is just too vast to get any sense of scale nowadays from the surviving six columns (from fifty-four - there were nine until an earthquake a couple of hundred years ago) - you just get an idea of what 22m-high columns look like. They'd have to reconstruct at least some of the inner temple walls to conjure up an impression of the whole thing.

The whole temple complex was walled around by the Mamlukes, and there's a tower extant at one corner of the old Temple of Jupiter: it has good views back along the old Mamluke walls to the hexagonal courtyard - from here you can also see how high the whole temple was raised above the surrounding landscape (13m). We leave the temple podium at the far corner, descending into the open space between the Temple of Jupiter and the smaller, parallel "Little Temple": this space is littered with fallen pieces of column, capitals, friezes and reliefs from the entablature (the large columns were surmounted with an entablature of giant lions' heads and garlands, all in massive pieces of carved marble). We explore the Mamluke walls and towers (and derelict mosque) in the south-west corner of the site before visiting the Little Temple. The Little Temple is also known as the Temple of Bacchus, after Bacchic scenes on its friezes. The actual dedication is much more obscure since the temple complex predates the Roman temple buildings - Hadad and Atargatis seem to have been the originals, and I don't know where the eponymous Baal fits into the picture (Baal-Hadad seems the result of an earlier grafting, transmuted into the generic sun god - hence Baalbek was Heliopolis to the Greeks - and thence to Jupiter to fit the nice Roman pantheon).

We enter the Little Temple (which is large, by the way) from the east side, ie. we walk all along it first, round the front and up the wide steps. It's fantastically well-preserved, even better than the Temple of Bel in Palmyra - a huge, high-walled inner building (more traditionally entered from one end rather than half-way along, as in Palmyra) surrounded by a single row of colummns, most of which are still standing. Not only are the columns standing and the entablature's in place, but large sections of the carved ceiling panels are still in place (we've never seen that). The huge carved doorway (a little squint these days) leads into the building, at the far end of which is a raised altar/podium with a little doorway at either side. Lines of holes around the niches in the walls show that much, if not all, of the interior was covered in marble. Amusingly, there's a plaque halfway up one of the walls which commemorates Kaiser Wilhelm II's visit - when he was here, that was ground level.

We walk all the way round the mostly-intact portico (seriously - all the columns are in place on two of the sides, and a few on the third), and then nip into a little museum in a Mamluke tower adjacent to the temple. There's not a lot inside - a few average sarcophagi, some inscriptions: to be honest there's better stuff lying around outside. The only thing we learn is that the fancy Arabic stalactite-riddled archways (above doors and windows) are called Muqarnas - there's a nice one of the way into the museum.
We retrace our route through the site, in case we've missed anything, and then check out the new museum beside the entrance: it's inside one long hall of the extensive Roman vaulting used to turn the hill into a level surface for the courtyard. It has a few more interesting pieces found in and arouund Baalbek but is best for its extensive information panels (though there's no logical way to walk through chronologically without zig-zagging). Inside we also meet a bunch of Australians from the hostel in Beirut: they're all heading for Syria later today and three (including Troy, who's been in Beirut almost as long as us) are planning to head south via Bosra and Jordan to Dahab for Christmas - we may see them there. They're all out the museum within fifteen or twenty minutes: it takes us forty-five - after all, it interests us that Baalbek was alternately Egyptian and then Assyrian before the usual Persian, Alexander, Pompey conquests. In many of the displays they stress the fact that the Little Temple and Temple of Jupiter "were never finished": this is misleading since in reality they were continually extending or modifying the temples, so of course the last set of changes wasn't completed.

Directly over the street is the third of Baalbek's three major temples - the "Temple of Venus": again, the designation is guesswork, based on the general rule that temples of Jupiter, Baachus and Venus often form a triad. It's a more delicate, circular, smaller temple, actually an octagon with three open sides, which was also later converted into a church. It's not technically open to the public, though there are plenty of holes in the fence: we don't go in, at least partially because it's in the centre of town and visible from everywhere (there's no-one else exploring inside, except some local kids letting off fireworks), but also because it's getting late and we want to be on a bus before the 16.30-18.00 hour-of-inactivity sets in.

Before leaving Baalbek we nip into the Great Umayyad Mosque (all rows of nicked columns - in the tourist literature photos it has no roof, but it does in reality) which the guy locks behind us. Then it's across town/village for another little look at a line of columns/facade which we saw earlier - there's half an arch there, impossibly balanced in mid-air (so presumably held in place with modern materials). And then it's onto a bus for Beirut which (after discussion with other passengers) actually decides to go on to Aanjar (in the opposite direction), so we get dropped at Shtura and shuttled (with others) onto another less-comfortable bus. This then proceeds into Beirut, but only as far as the driver wants to eat iftaar. Fortunately we're seasoned professionals and recognise where he's dropped us: pausing only for a long and much-needed piss (in some poor soul's doorway), we carry on the four blocks to where we caught the bus from this morning and take a local microbus back to the hotel.
We round off the day with free-delivery pizza (we saw Troy & co. eating one yesterday), watching a travel programme (Cuba) on BBC World, and so on. Baalbek gets 5/10, meanwhile: not that many ruins, but all very impressive.