Week Sixty-Four

Today we split from Beirut - up early, settle accounts with Zaher, leave our rucksacks there (he'll keep the room for us too) and out by 10.15. A quick detour to get cash out (we were down to less than a dollar), followed by a stop to buy biscuits and cigarettes, and then we're on a bus to Tripoli by 10.35: this time we get a bus in which we can turn off the individual air conditioning. The traffic leaving Beirut is impossible - we're mostly stationary for the first twenty minutes: after that, though, the road clears and the driver seems to be trying to make up the lost time. We'd done the coast road up as far as Jbail before - all concrete and shops with English/Latin-character signs and cheap nightclubs and the casino, etc. It transpires that past Jbail the built-up hinterland of Beirut finally stops. There's open land, with some agriculture, but mostly bare mountains (bare mountains, by the way, normally doesn't stop them building on them in Lebanon).

We pass the new white concrete outskirts of Tripoli, and soon the bus has pretty much ground to a halt again: rather than wait for it to arrive in the centre, we get out and backtrack 100m to Tourist Information. They give us a fairly useless, mostly adverts, map of the city and a couple of leaflets on the Cedars and Bsharré: from there, without too much difficulty, we locate the Pension which Zaher and most of the writers in his guestbook recommended. It's in a turn-of-the-century French/Paris-styled block: the type with a narrow straircase between what is effectively two stand-alone blocks. It has a kind of decrepid charm, I feel, which fails to charm Milla. The actual pension, on the second floor, is quite surreal - it's a large appartment, with large rooms (the family presumably lives here too), but they've managed to fill all the space with kitsch. Our room, as well as having three beds, also has three tables covered in lace and embroidery tablecloths (two to each table), a cuddly tiger in a little wicker basket of artificial flowers, a donkey of the type people buy in Spain when they're drunk, an embroidered "nature scene" picture on one wall, and so on. The last offer price of $12 leaves Milla even less charmed, but we go for it anyway - it's already almost 13.00 and we don't want to waste our sole afternoon in Tripoli looking for hotels.

We dump our bag (we've packed an overnight bag for this side-trip) and set off south-east towards the old town, avoiding waves of small children who've just been let out of school: our first target is the citadel, which towers over the rest of the old town, and is at the top of an awful lot of steps. The entrance fee is equally steep, and the guy doesn't seem remotely interested in giving discounts to anyone other than Lebanese studednts: he does give us a nice little 48-page (with lots of photos) book of walking tours in Tripoli (dunno why Tourist Information didn't oblige us with the same).
There's been a castle here for ages, so what's left is an odd amalgamation of various architectural styles: it's called "Sinjil", after Raymond de Saint-Gilles: the Crusaders were here for almost 200 years. With four levels in most placecs, passages and rooms in most of the walls, and major building complexes both in the middle and around the northern entry, there's a lot to see. We go anti-clockwise around it (twice, on the various levels, with quite a bit of doubling back) and discover too late that we should have brought our torches: there are some rooms inside the walls, descending around the southern end, which were just too dark to explore otherwise.

The main disappointment is that half of the best-preserved parts were behind locked doors (mainly the parts that were clearly still in use under the Ottomans). The main surprise was finding an antiquated elevator (and later its winch) tucked away in one corner (clever old Crusaders). The best bits, on balance, were probably the remains (now open-roofed) of the octagonal church, and the views of dismal-looking Tripoli (the "river", just below the citadel, is more of a storm-drainage channel). We're there for over an hour, which would have been much longer but we're pretty blazé about castles these days: the citadeel alone, since it's almost as big (if not bigger) as Misiaf Castle, deserves a score and gets 3/10 on the ruins scale, if only for having a number of really neat staircases on top of very precarious looking arches.

We head down the hill, wandering through a number of twisting stone alleyways flanked by high stone-walled bulidings, designed primarily to be defensible but now very scenic (and smelly - Tripoli's not nearly as clean as Beirut: it also has a hell of a lot less bullet- and shell-pocked walls and buildings). There are lanes of stalls and little shops, and we note that the shopping seems much more interesting (and cheaper)than in Beirut. We come out at a couple of madrasas tucked against the side of the Great Mosque: it's prayer time and there are south-facing windows looking onto the street, which is quite unnerving when you look through them directly at a sea of synchronised praying faces - we decide not to visit right now: later, if we have time.
After passing another couple of madrasas (lots here), we take a wander through the gold bazaar and have a look inside the old Soap Khan: most of it is empty and unused, but there's still at least one family making and selling traditional olive oil-based soaps. We spot a Japanese couple, whom we saw earlier at the pension, inspecting and smelling various soaps and we leave them to it. North along more narrow lanes of stalls (the shopping is much better than the Beirut we've seen, much much better than Damascus, and is heading towards Aleppo-standards: yes, there are ten stalls all selling socks (for example), but they've all got different designs!).

Eventually we come out at the Tailors' Khan, a strange narrow vaulted passage of shops which apparently has Byzantine origins. Even stranger is a (locked) bathhouse next door, which was apparently built during the Crusader occupation (another first - I didn't think Crusaders washed). Over the street is the small and smelly Egyptian Khan - there isn't a lot going on here (there's one shop), so we take the opportunity to have a cigarette (Tripoli's much more islamic than Beirut) and then step outside to admire the Burtashya Mosque. There are a number of mosques here with square, defensive-tower-like minarets and we press north (after passing an old fountain which apparently used to be filled with fruit juice on public holidays - crazy arabs; oh, and the old arched Haraj Bazaar, reminiscent of Aleppo) to another one - at the large Tawbah Mosque. A stone-built (everything in old Lebanon was sandstone) mosque, it has a neat dome of undiscernible purpose (to me, a non-muslim) in the courtyard as well as the fortified minaret.

From there we wander back via the "Christian Quarter" (it's seriously full of churches - one every block for a while): Christian it may be, but everyone still frowns at us when we risk smoking a cigarette in public, and the headscarf incidence (50%) is no lower than the rest of the city. All the churches here are only 100-150 years old, and the only notable one is a converted soap factory (seriously). After getting lost for a few strerets, and shopping again for a present for Milla's mother, ,we return to the hotel and consume half a kilo of baclava for iftaar. After that, I write for a couple of hours while Milla sleeps.

A few hours later we nip out for shwarma (no problem here - very close to the hotel) and water (again, a little minimarket round the corner obliges) and mandarins (from a barrow, at the end of the alley) and a present for Milla's mother (again, no joy). And after that? Back at the hotel? We read Hello Magazine - probably the best of the magazines which comprise the hotel's evening entertainment offerings, and then hit the sack. They have an old Hitchcockian woman here, who fills an armchair strategically placed to see most of the hotel common areas - called "Grandma", she's apparently one of the selling points of this primarily French-speaking hotel. She watches over trips to the toilet and to brush our teeth, somewhat creepily.
A last quick note (I couldn't think of a better place to put it): Arabic has no verb "to be" - they just don't have a verb in clauses where we would use it. That seemed very odd to me for the last few weeks, but I'm getting used to it - in English it's difficult to think of a sentence where its omission would lead to confusion. Oh, and there's no letter "P" (which I think I've mentioned before).

Despite the presence of "Grandma" only 15 metres away, and the pink sheets, we sleep long and well and only get up at 09.00. Remarkably, though perhaps due to having nothing for breakfast except a mandarin each (and a coffee, of course) we get out at 09.45: the staff express their surprise that we're leaving so late for Bsharré - the last bus back, they warn, is at 15.30. Running too late for a quick side-trip to see the inside of the Great Mosque (it didn't look that Great from the outside), we head for Tourist Information (where the Bsharré buses leave from): if there isn't a bus for a while, then we'll grab something to eat.

It turns out that there's a bus leaving almost immediately and just after 10.00 we're en route out of Tripoli and into the mountains behind it (the highest in Lebanon, with the highest peak at over 3,000m or 10,000 feet). It's a shallow climb at first, through green (genuine green grass - there's pretty plentiful water here) and citrus fields, but it rapidly becomes steeper as we take a road up the southern side of the huge Kadisha gorge. The twisting road has worryingly vertical inclines (ie. cliffs) to the side and, with the driver continually in conversation with a female passenger beside him, becomes the most alarming ride of our trip so far. More interestingly the road is lined with Christian shrines (as in Greece) and there are churches everywhere: in fact, on the trip up, we don't see a single mosque - this is clearly where a lot of Lebanon's 40% Christians hang out. Another unusual feature as we ascend towards the obviously snow-capped peaks (Milla's in sandals - she threw out her walking shoes yesterday) are the red-tiled sloping roofs of many of the houses - most of Lebanon is flat-roofed, but here they obviously get a lot of rain and/or snow.

After an hour and a half of spectacular scenery (and a spectacularly large picture of Mary and child painted on a hillside/cliff), we round the top of the gorge and look down on the town of Bsharré. It's perched on the top of a cliff (actually everything around here is perched on top of a cliff), and is dominated by a couple of large churches - we're ready to get off in Bsharré (and get something to eat), but the driver tells us he's going on to the Cedars. Excellent. The bus climbs further, getting closer and closer to the snowline and, after passing a little tourist village of chalet-like hotels and practice ski-slopes, are dropped at a line of souvenir shops. This is the largest remaining clump (?) of Cedars in Lebanon, which is pretty sad because it's just a little walled-in grove. Solomon built his temple from cedarwood; it was the foundation of the Phoenicians' wealth; the Egyptians used huge quantities; and it's the tree in the middle of the Lebanese flag. So we gotta see them.

The guy at the gate lets us in for free when he learns we're students, and lets us use the site toilets, and then we're off. There's not actually a huge amount I can say - there are about a dozen trees older than 1,500 years, but that just means they're bigger and more spread-out than the hundred or so baby ones: you can ask them questions about days gone by, but they don't answer (or at least they didn't on the day we were there). Milla's sandals are, of course, utterly impractical for the mud and snow-covered (yes, snow-covered) paths around the site, and she begins to get seriously cold (partly, no doubt, because she's not wearing any socks).

There are fallen branches and dead Cedars at intervals (at least one has a lightning conductor fitted), and one of the old twisted trunks has been turned into a neat little (large) sculpture with a face, a torso and a cross carved in the wood. A bit more imaginative than the "Cedars of Lebanon"-type souvenirs we saw in the gift shops. It's while we're at the sculpture that we hear the (presumed) bus horn - goddam - and when we leave eventually, after about 30 minutes, there's no sign of the bus (he was dropping a couple of uniformed passengers further up the hill - there are always some military on every bus trip here - and then turning round). We admire the big Cedar outside the complex, glance over the various cedarwood souvenirs again (I don't see an ironic "Save the Cedars" plaque), check out the one over-priced minimarket and then set off down the hill on foot - there's not a lot of traffic here to wait for. "Hill", by the way, is the wrong word: "mountain" and "cliff" are both closer.

We pass through the little ski village (the slopes are dry, the hotels are empty, and there doesn't seem to be a shop), and then branch off the main road and head down a more vertical one signed to Bsharré and the Kadisha Grotto. The massive gorge is the Kadisha Valley, ideal for serious hikers, packed with churches, shrines and monasteries, and quite terrifying in its verticality - just looking around (never mind down) can make you feel quite dizzy. The "Kadisha Grotto" is a 500m-long cave, a tourist attraction (though less so than the famous Jeitta Grotto north of Beirut), and wasn't on our list but hey - if it turns out that we're passing the entrance, then we might just nip in. Especially if it has a little café that sells coffee or food.
Actually it turns out that we're not passing the entrance - a little pickup truck stops and offers us a lift, so we climb in the back: there's a thin layer of mud, but that doesn't worry us nearly as much as the fact there's no back. We both cling on tightly (Milla looking staunchly at her feet, and she's the one facing the mountainside!) as the little vehicle hairpins its way along the sheer cliff-face to the upper outskirts of Bsharré. Our lift saved us about 4km, though we spend 10 minutes cleaning our hands and clothes afterwards (I've cut my hand, having been holding on so tightly) - hey-ho. After that it's a twenty-minute walk downhill to the centrtal square (it's not that large a town, but the roads zig-zag a lot), dominated by the St. Saba church (no idea about St. Saba), and stop in a little café for a bite to eat (spiced Lebanese sausages for me, and a burger for Milla).
Our little snack takes 45 minutes (they're just not geared up for people eating during the day, even these Christians), and includes a very strange Nescafé 3-in-1 made with warm milk (3-in-1 is the readymade sachet which contains creamer and sugar). Now behind schedule, we walk east through Bsharré: every building seems to be a church, or at least have a cross or a picture of Mary on prominent display - even more so than Tripoli, Bsharré seems to have emerged unscathed by the Civil War. Another thing which strikes me as an architectural oddity is the huge numbers of new concrete houses/miniblocks going up (very slowly in most cases) - as if there's some kind of population boom going on here (and elsewhere in the valley/gorge).

Just after the town stops, there's a large black bust of Khalil Gibran overlooking Bsharré (born here, he latterly wanted to return but perfectly understandably never got round to it), beyond which is the Gibran Museum: he also wanted to be buried in the old monastery here, and is. Of course, it's no longer a monastery because it's been converted into a museum about him, which may not have been his intention. We get in as Romanian students for 2,000 ($1.30) each, but have to endure an entire conversation about new Romanian versions of his works.

Inside is a huge collection of his paintings - clearly most of them didn't get snapped up by private collectors, and it's not difficult to see why that was. They're a pretty substandard bunch of mystical nudes with titles like "The Immense Self in the Meditation of Her Being", or "Great Self carrying the Small Self". Actually the titles were added later, possibly by someone on opiates. The Blakeian pictures (he called the "visions", not pictures) mainly reflect Gibran's whacko ideeas about woman's affinity with earth/nature/child and man's upward or downward destiny. They also have some notebooks (which are interesting inasmuch as they show how he worked, both in Arabic and English), and sections of his personal library (no surprise to see a big book on Blake there). The most interesting displays are his illustrations for The Prophet (complete with coffee stains) and his portraits (including Jung, Debussy, Rodin, WB Yeats and Tagore). His tomb is downstairs, very tactfully done, and we also learn that he's Jibran (rather than a hard "G").

We leave the museum at 16.15 - the nice man there is concerned about how we'll get back to Tripoli: rightly, as it transpires. We meet a Slovenian photography student waiting for a direct Beirut bus which locals are convinced doesn't exist: we also meet a Lebanese-Canadian in the same predicament. After some discussion and options including a taxi for $10 each, we end up taking a lift for $6 each - the Lebanese-Canadian thinks this is a great deal, the rest of us think it's a rip-off. He's obviously been tricked into the whole Lebanon-is-expensive concept (whereas Lebanon is actually just greedy). Another great truism about Lebanon is demonstrated by the driver's choice of music for the descent - piano backed by strings, playing slightly swinging versions of classical and movie themes: Clayderman and James Last, but worse than either (yes, worse than Clayderman - it's like our trip from Brasov to Bucuresti). The truism in question is that not only is Lebanon hooked on kitsch, but they're all stuck in either the early 70s or late 80s as far as style goes - all the new buildings in Beirut are bland sandstone boxes; everyone thinks Mercedes and BMW are hip cars; Madonna is the soundtrack of choice with the young (rather than the middle-aged audience she has in most countries); the kids drive about in single-sex carloads, screeching round corneres with the windows down and the headlights on in the fashion still popular with Young Farmers in Huntly (for God's sake). Boy, I don't like Lebanon - or perhaps I just don't like the urban Lebanese.
We left Bsharré (3/10 - great setting) at 16.45 and reach Tripoli at about 18.10. It takes us a while to return to the hotel via a couple of shwarmas, collect our bags and get on an ageing public transport bus (we're on at 18.40 - it leaves at 18.55). The guys in the row in front of us confirm my above rambling, by the way - they both have way too much hair gel on, tight curly perms (the one in front of Milla has long, permed hair!): they look as if they're about to audition for Saturday Night Fever. It wouldn't have surprised me if they'd been wearing medallions. Tripoli, meanwhile fading away behind us, gets 6/10: it's an old Arab city, with heavy European influences, and wasn't flattened by the Civil War - the old town is mostly medieval, the shopping's good, and the prices aren't as inflated as Beirut.

Despite the nature of the bus (stopping at lots of places) we get into Beirut at a very reasonable 20.05. Unfortunately, and compensating for the fact that this bus was cheaper than a minicoach or microbus, it drops us at Dora junction rather than Charles Helou. Not knowing how far out we are, we opt to walk - which ends up taking an hour: that notwithstanding, we managed to walk pretty much straight to the hotel (pretty good, considering we were using the Force to navigate). Zaher has kept us a room, which unfortunately is the pretty barren double upstairs rather than the much nicer one downstairs (he gives us each a free juice to apologise) - Milla's really pissed off about this, but her mood improves when I coax the TV into working.
We put a washload in Zaher's machine and spend the late evening/early morning in the hotel lounge, playing backgammon, smoking nargile and chatting with our Australian and Japanese fellow residents. We eventually hit the sack at about 01.00, after hanging our newly-washed clothes up on the roof (where we find the hotel staff sleeping on mattresses under the stars).

I'm up just after 07.00 and take a shower downstairs, and wash my hair: the second floor houses some kind of property management company, but they're not in yet - their glass-fronted office looks on the stairs. Zaher and company are doing a lot of work on the third floor, and at this particular point in time there's no hot running water. Milla gets up later, as I'm repacking some of my rucksack, and has an urgent need for breakfast - she goes out and buys some bits and pieces. Time passes, we eat, we check our email, we watch some TV, Milla brings the (now dry) washing down from the terrace, we entertain ourselves in the privacy of our own, lockable (unlike in Tripoli) room.
In other words we do nothing for the morning, and almost before we know it it's afternoon.
In theory, today we were going to see the highlights of Beirut which we've missed so far (preparatory to leaving for Syria): a walk along the old Green Line; the National Museum; the restored Ottoman Grand Serail; and perhaps the AUB (American University of Beirut) campus. We don't have time left today so, magically (and recurrently), we simply decide to spend another day here - it's not like Damascus, where we were overtaken with lethargy and ennui: it's just a fairly comfortable place to kick around not doing anything. Pity it's so expensive.

The afternoon passes - Milla sleeps and I write and check our finances (on this leg, we've been on the road for 9 weeks and have spent $52 less than our Bucuresti-based guess for the first 9 weeks - pretty spot on). Lebanon is costing about $240 a week for two people, which is almost exactly the same as Turkey's average spend: Syria averaged about $140. Early in the evening, Milla springs into action again and we head out - there's a Moroccan craft fair thing going on in a large tent nearby, so we check that out (some nice stuff, including china, but all too expensive for us - it's a pretty upmarket import-export affair). Then we walk to Hamra and pretty much straight into Pizza Hut - we were hoping their 2-for-1 pizza-and-Pepsi offer applied to sit-in here, but it's only for takeaway: so we buy one and take it away. We walk down to the shore to eat it (no decent parks in central Beirut), which takes ages. We emerge at a high lighthouse on a hill, opposite a little naval base, and walk up to a little headland where waves are crashing around a little café on the rocks - by the time we get there, unfortunately, our pizzas are half-cold.
Lots of people pass and quite a lot stare (eating in public is just not something people do here), but we get to stare back at them. Most seem to be out on the promenade (Corniche) for some kind of pseudo-exercise, and that pseudo-exercise is primarily brisk walking. Bizarrely, for this brisk walking, they've all changed into trainers, Nike-label "sports socks", and tracksuits with go-faster stripes on the sleeves.
We meander back by soldier-guarded McDonalds for an ice-cream, and then along beside the port, and get back fairly late. Again, the evening passes watching TV and playing backgammon.

I'm up a little after 08.00 (bed at 01.30), and Milla's just behind me (despite watching a film until 03.00 - that TV in the room is such a temptation for her). Breakfast is chocolate rolls dipped in yoghurt (another first) and then, mid-morning, we set out into Beirut. The city's quiet (we observed the almost deserted roads from our window) - today is the first post-Ramadan day, which is the biggest Islamic holiday for the year: it's so quiet that all the bacnks and the post offices are shut. Damn - I'd brought an evelope of photos with me to post - hey-ho: we return to the hotel, drop the envelope and set out again (at 11.45, this time).

Starting from the Place des Martyrs, we walk south along the former Green Line that was the front line between the Christian and Muslim parts of the city. Apart from some localised action, this was where the highest density of the combat took place and is consequently where a lot of the damage was done. It runs south along the Damascus Road (now Rue 17, though our Tourist Information map and Lonely Planet both use the name rather than the number), and runs through the middle of where a.) most of the new/restored buildings are going up, and b.) where the most ruinous damage can still be seen. It also leads us pretty much straight to the National Museum, in the hot midday sun, which (as we'd feared) is also closed. There are half a dozen soldiers guarding the door with big fuck-off guns, and one of them tells us it'll be open tomorrow. Great.

It's already too late to head for Syria - we need to leave early if we're to change at Damascus and get down to the Jordanian border; also there are persistant rumours of problems getting transit visas, so we need to leave time to resolve anything like that which arises. Instead, we decide to have a look at the few other things Beirut has to offer. We start off just along from the National Museum at the "Hippodrome", which disappointingly turns out just to be a modern racecourse. Then we head north again, for another half-hour walk back to the centre, going along streets just west of the old Green Line.

We have a look at the old ruined cinema by the Central District, which must have been a really ugly building even before it was half-destroyed, and then we investigate the ruins of the old Roman high street (only uncovered during the rebuilding, and well below modern street level). They're a bit of a jumble and not at all impressive or interesting - I guess the locals have more pressing priorities than getting their ancient ruins sorted out. We go uphill past a church which caught my eye (one side of the tower has been left half-ruined; the rest is restored) and then cross the street to the Grand Serail. Built by the Ottomans, it's a great big square office building with a courtyard in the middle: it's not in any objective way attractive, but it is very big and features in most of the tourist leaflets about Beirut. The soldiers (there are lots of them here) let us look round the courtyard, but not take photos of the inside. It's actually quite pleasant inside, with some attractive architectural detail and a large fountain - I think it's the first fountain we've seen in Beirut.

After that we head west into Hamra and Ras Beirut (the areas flanking the AUB campus), which are about the only areas which look fairly normal in Beirut (mixed architecture, shops, cafés and so on). The AUB campus is walled and has some half-dozen entrances - all guarded, of course, by armed soldiers. We breeze through the first gate we come to without any problems, even though the first noticeboard we read inside is full of talk about visitor's passes and so on. The campus is quite surreal - it's full of neo-classical ivy-clad buildings, and it's got block-like halls of residence, and a little chapel, and tennis courts, and little areas of greenery (our second fountain in Beirut). It's as if someone's transplanted a little small-town American University to Beirut - which is fair. We use their toilets, and look at the famous Centre for Arab and Middle East Studies, and sit for a while watching all the activity. All the activity, by the way, is supplied by cats - we see at least twenty during our visit.

We eventually pull ourselves away from all the excitement, grab an ice-cream and burger from McDonalds and a couple of coffees from a grungy café and then head back to the hotel. We play chess and more backgammon with fellow residents, and then Milla goes shopping with one of the Japanese girls (there are four staying at the moment - the most female travellers we've seen in any one place) while I put in a couple of hours on the internet (there are still gaps in Turkey; only the first half of Syria is done; and there's nothing about Lebanon). They return and shortly after I have a mysterious bag of goodies in my shoes and a note from St. Nicholas (as does she) - sweets and fruit are the traditional St. Nicholas presents ("and sometimes stationery products"), quite different from Christmas gifts and delivered (obviously) on the 5th of December. Once again, I worry about her sanity.

Up late (08.45) and a slow breakfast of paté/cheese on rolls - not to worry, since today's a single-task day: the National Museum, our only real reason for spending the last two days in Beirut (so it had better be good). First off, though, and proving that today isn't actually a single-task day, I set off late morning for the Post Office but discover that yep - it's closed today as well (the end of Ramadan, we believe, is very much a three-day holiday). I return in a really bad mood (that museum had better be fucking open) and we retrace our route of yesterday and reach the museum at 11.50. Even from a distance we can see it's open (there are bins outside the doors) and we inside we discover we get a student discount ($0.65 instead of $3.30 each). Disappointingly, it looks like quite a small museum.

Our tour starts with a 20-minute video on the restoration and re-opening: lying pretty much right on the Green Line, the museum didn't fare too well - there are gasps around the room when they show pictures of the 1991 state of the building. Fortunately, some far-thinking individuals acted in 1975 when the scale of the forth-coming conflict became obvious: the small piececs were transferred to underground storerooms (though many suffered extensive water/humidity/salinity damage when the sealed lower levels flooded); the mosaics were covered in plastic sheeting and then cement; the larger pieces like sarchophagi were encased in concrete boxes, in situ. Still, it took a hell of a lot of work to clean up both the pieces and the building.
The ground floor is mostly stonework and mostly Roman (though it has a mosaic of "Seven Wise Men" at the centre - we can only identify Socrates): there are earlier piececse which show the strong Egyptian influence on the indigenous Phoenician culture (c. 3000BC onwards). The best pieces here are fantastic sarcophagi - probably rivalled so far only by those in Istanbul (which came from Saida anyway): there's on decorated with drunken cupids, a couple showing scenes from the Achilles legends (very vivid and three-dimensional), and the Ahriman sarcophagus - much more Assyrian/Hittite in style and 3000+ years old, it has an inscription in Phoenician - forerunner of the Greek and Latin alphabets. They have a couple of "Anthropoid Sarcophagi" - featureless which marble, with eerie sculpted heads as if sleeping: an odd fusion of Greek and Egyptian which we haven't seen before. Also in Greek style (though 150+ years before Alexander turned up and "Hellenised" the area) are a collection of statues of baby boys from Eshmouun. The bull-headed capital is also here from Eshmoun (thank God), but there's no sign of the ruined mosaics - so I guess they're ruined. That's about it for the ground floor except for some sphinx-flanked "Thrones of Astarte" (similar to the one we saw in Eshmoun), a couple of architects' marble pre-construction mockups (one of a theatre, the other of a temple), and a few remaining bullet-holes in some of the walls.
Upstairs are smaller piececs - pottery, glass, coins and so on. Highlights are some fantastic Bronze Age makeup boxes in the shape of ducks/swans, a number of very Celtic-looking torcs from 2000-1500BC and some animal figurines of lambs, rats, cats, dogs and hippopotami (the upright, walking hippos are cute, but unconvincing): also the geometric intricacy of the Mamluke jewellery is excellent - much better than the Roman or Byzantine stuff. Low points are probably the coin collections (yawn) and a huge collection of bronze figures found in the Obelisk temple in Byblos - sadly they're something of a motif for archaeology in Lebanon and you can get replicas, T-shirts, prints and so on.
The museum turned out to be excellent - almost all the pieces were good, and they haven't filled all the rooms with hundreds of amphorae. Amusingly everything is labelled by who was in charge, or the culture - "Ayyubid Period", "Roman Period", "Early Bronze Age", etc. except for a few Crusader pieces where are labelled "XII-XIII Century": ho-ho. Including the video and two cigarette breaks, the visit took just over three hours. We walk leisurely back, stopping at a bar on the way (he's actually closed, but gives us a couple of free beers by way of apology - there's no such thing as afternoon drinking in Lebanon).

The evening is filled with writing and washing clothes a few more clothes - typically there's a thunderstorm, so the clothes are hung in a less-than-ideal spot: we'll see how they are tomorrow, when we should be heading over the border and south.

We're up a little after 08.15 - breakfast, packing, paying (ouch!) and so on takes a couple of hours: still, we're at the bus station for 10.30 and pull away just before 11.00. Now we'll see if there's any truth to the rumours of transit visa problems at this crossing. Actually, not "now" - with the obligatory 25 minute pointless stop at a café en route, Lebanese exit procedure (the guy's the same as the one who gave us our entry visas and recalls that Milla's a "journalist" even though her exit card has a blank occuption - he has a good laugh about that), and another inexplicable stop just after the border, it's 14.00 before we even get to the Syrian border - plenty time for some final relections on Lebanon and Beirut.
First off, I'm giving Beirut 5/10 but that'll drop to 4/10 once they've pulled down or repaired all the war-damaged facades, empty shells and bullet-pocked walls - let's be honest: they're currently the city's main tourist attraction and about the only photogenic thing there. I know we spent a lot of time in Beirut, but that was mainly because it was so comfortable and western after Syria (and even Turkey), but I personally didn't like it much. I don't know if pre-1975 it had much characters, but they're certainly working hard to remove any trace of one now. Particular irritations are their bland new buildilngs, the fact theyt continually boast about the good nightlife (the bars don't open until 21.00, there's usually a dress code and the drinks are over-priced: ie. these are people who want to be seen to be out, not people who want to go out to have a good time), the way they're filling all the open spaces with new buildings and roads, and the fact they decided to build shopping centrtes instead of rebuilding the souqs. Oh - and the way they keep filling the pavements with obstacles, because everybody drives everywhere: I don't like that either.

The rest of Lebanon I mostly preferred to Beirut - the north was much less affected by the war - its older and cheaper and has a bit of real life; the south is obviously poorer, still recovering from the war and the Israeli occupation, but has better historical sites; and the Bekaa Valley is pretty cool - again, less touched by the war than Beirut, it seems to have gotten over it better, despite the ubiquitous Syrian checkpoints. In all, it's a very small country and everything in it feels very small (even though eg. Baalbek isn't, for what it is): it's a sort of cozy country which is sadly turning slowly into a Disney parody of itself. And I hate the way they love all things American (common in the area), despite a.) mostly claiming to hate America and b.) having that French superior arrogance . . . yep, they think "French" means "cultured", even though they watch American TV, drink American drinks, wear American-styled clothes, have pegged their currency to the US Dollar, listen to American music, etc.

Now, though, we're back in Syria - or rather we're not quite. It's with some trepidation that we wait in the Foreigners/Etrangers queue (behind an English woman with a Diplomatic Passport - boy, she was processed quickly) - after all, we don't have valid visas for Syria and traditionally that's always meant you have to fly out of Lebanon. Eventually (the rest of the queue takes a while to process) there's great news and awful news - first off, there's no problem with us buying transit visas here (yippee); second, though, it transpires that (at this crossing point at least) for UK citizens that costs $52 - ie. the same as a 1-month visa (bah). Milla's transit visa is a much more reasonable $20. We do some quick maths and decide that even if we can get transit visas for $18 each at the northern/Homs crossing ($18 is the most quoted figure, so it's probably for Australians - the largest group of travellers) it'll cost us an extra night and several extra bus trips: a potential saving of $36 would cost us about $30 plus a day's food (plus hassle). What the fuck. We fork out the money and pretty much ensure that today will be our most expensive day since leaving Bucuresti. The only other incident at the border is that I swap $10 for S£500 with a Japanese fellow traveller from the same hotel (losing out slightly on the deal) - bastard Japs only pay $8 for a transit visa. We now have about $70/£45 to spend in a maximum of 48 hours/"3 jours" in Syria - boy, we'll live well.

We leave the border at 14.45 and are at good ol' Baramke bus terminal by 15.15: there's a direct bus to Bosra at 18.00 so we buy tickets, leave our rucksacks at the bus company office, buy a couple of Syrian-priced shwarma (14p each) and set out to see the National Museum for a couple of hours - after Lebanon's, it's got a tough act to follow. Any hopes we had were immediately dashed since we discover (at 15.40, when we reach the gate) that it's only open from 09.00 to 15.00 daily, even outsided Ramadan. Bollocks. Lacking any other alternatives, we shop in the Takiyya souq for a bit and buy Christmas/St. Nicholas day presents for Milla's relatives - that used up a lot of Syrian pounds, and made me feeling really guilty about mine. Damascus meanwhile is full of life - there are jolly, friendly people filling the streets; the drivers are less aggressive; there are little shops and stalls all over the place. The whole town's relaxed and wound down, either because we're still in the 3-day post-Ramadan festival or simply because we're not in Ramadan any more.
We run into another fellow-Beiruter (the old Japanese - seriously, he's ancient to be travelling like this) and walk with him for a while, before buying more supplies (over a kilo of sweet pastries) and catching our bus. Damascus finally gets 4/10 - it's big with quite a lot to see and lots of shopping (though not nearly as good as Aleppo): it's also badly laid-out, dirty, over-priced, kinda soulless and epitomises all that's worst about Syria.
It's a pretty uneventful trip south, except for when we almost hit a small child walking with his family up the fast lane - we get a good view from our first-booked seats behind the driver: we pass within 10km of the Jordanian border before swinging east towards Bosra. After a bit longer, and a few minor villages, we pass clusters of shops and a big Roman arch before finally being dropped at what looks like a pretty desolate part of town: both of us fear a repeat of our Palmyra experience. Not to worry - a friendly local points us to the Qala'at, only 200m away (but difficult to recognise in the dark - it's made from black stones), and recommends we look for "Obeida" if we need anything.

We circle the very dark and very closed-looking (it's after 20.00) castle to the bridge/entrance on the far side. There's someone there! Even better, he's the man to talk to about sleeping here - since before leaving Scotland, the castle in Bosra has been one of my pre-planned accommodation options. Unfortunately it suddenly turns out to be for students only: fortunately, the guy accepts our cards. Way-hey (and it'll cost us $2 each!). We make polite conversation for a bit and then he leads us along a wide medieval dark hall, and up impossibly steep steps which climb forever, and suddenly we're on the roof of one of the towers, being shown a simple but adequate room. Yes, of course we'll take it (as far as we know the only other option in town is a $100-a-night luxury hotel) - it's just a pity the night is pitch-black and we can't really see anything.

We set out into town for water and immediately run into Troy - an Australian from (yep) the hotel in Beirut: he's staying at the citadel too, informs us that there's nowhere really for cheap food, points out a direction for minimarkets and opines that there's nothing to do at night here except wander around the "old city". Despite that, he's been here for five days. We walk along some fairly bland sterets, finally find somewhere selling water (and find the world's most incomprehensible tourist information board - the map has a baffling legend of meaningless English against a number of symbols, and none of these symbols appears on the map), and return to the citadel where the guardian chap makes us tea and we watch the opening round of this year's Miss World (Miss Scotland and Miss Romania are out at the earliest opportunity). After that, having collected our torches, we go to explore the castle - somewhere in here there's suppose to be a concealed Roman Theater.
We explore for a bit, spotting occasional columns, and following Roman-looking entrances and suddenly find ourselves in a huge 15,000-seat theater right in the middle. It seems very impressive, with the white stage and orchestra visible in the starlight. We try to get down, but the stairs seem to abruptly stop and, not knowing how intact the seating is, we abandon our attempt. Instead we wander about trying to get down through the Roman tunnels and medieval superstructure: it takes forever, mainly because (like the cowards we are) we kept stopping and turning back when it got too . . . spooky, frankly. It's very strange wandering about a castle-come-theatre entirely on your own, and in complete darkness. When we eventually emerge on the stage (there was a way close to the bottom of the stairs to our tower) we check the superb acoustics and then return upstairs (that would be to our tower) at least partly because it's getting colder - below 10 degrees: apparently it was really cold last night.
There's a bit of a party going on in one of the other rooms (the other eight or so residents are gathered there): they're planning to let off fireworks from the stage later. We hear them after a couple of hours - whizzes and bangs echoing around the theater - and we drop off later than they return and lose consciousness (judging by the noise level) at about 01.00
Today's total spend finally came in at £98.50: ouch - our most expensive day.

We're up at 08.00, almost out at 09.00 but actually out at 09.30 - mind you, it depends what you mean by "out". We manage to leave the room by 09.30, but not the building - ie. the castle/citadel/theater. There was also something of a revelation waiting for us in the daylight: just behind us (and through our window) is a surprise - where we thought the town stopped (there were no streetlights), there's a mass of Roman, Byzantine and Arab remains. Arches and towers and columns stretch away into the middle distance - this is clearly what Troy meant by the "old city". Looks like there's more to see here than the theatre: nonetheless, the theatre's where we are and the theatre's where we start.

It's much more impressive during the day, though obviously less atmospheric: all in black basalt with occasional decorative limestone layers and blocks, it's reminiscent of Qala'at Marqab. The castle's well-preserved, ie. pretty much intact - D-shaped with eight towers of various designs and sizes (dating to at least two periods of construction); a wide vaulted corridor runs all the way round, mostly under a wide flag-stoned terrace. The stage and orchestra of the theatre (also, obviously, D-shaped) are below the ground level of the castle: the terrace enters into the seating area two-thirds of the way up. During the fortification, the inside of the theatre was built on (3-storey buildings and a cistern, with a mosque on the stage). Nowadays that's all been cleared away, and all the bits put back in place (including a number of the columns which used to ring the top of the entire theatre), leaving it as the best-preserved theatre that we've seen. And we've seen a few.

Since we started our tour, the citadel/theatre has gradually become busy - an Arab couple sits halfway up (he sings to her quietly - hopefully she appreciates it more than we did); groups of kids run around; some staff of some sort move . . . stuff around. The theatre seems to be a popular hang-out for locals (most of them don't seem to pay anything, especially the women). Other items of itnerest are stacked railings and half-broken ticket kiosks stashed away in corners - the theatre obviously still sees some usage, including a recent production of Swan Lake by a Russian/Ukrainian company). We spend two and a half hours working the interlinked passages and towers (some completely intact, others a bit crumbled), and the access tunnels of the theatre, andthen emerge past the guy at the gate (less laid back than the guy last night, but selling an interesting selection of guidebooks) into the rest of the town. Outside, as well as a couple fo donkeys-and-carriages and one camel, we run into Troy and his friend again - they're leaving today, heading south into Jordan - we'll probably catch them up later.

After a little detour for shopping (water, film and felafel) we set off north along a Roman colonnaded street - we saw it last night, with women carrying shopping bags: surreally the entire Roman city is interwoven with the contemporary town (or at least partly - the government is gradually moving people out and into nice new houses on the fare side of Bosra: some of the emptied shells of people's homes still have little gardens of flowers). Towards the end of this little street are the impressive remains of the Roman baths - the calderium (?) still has its original roof, though currently held up by French archaeologists' scaffolding (according to noticeboards int eh castle, work is being carried out by the French, Italian and German archaeologists in various areas of the site). The other rooms are pretty impressive too, particularly the colonnaded courtyard (palaestra? Solarium?). By this point we've picked up a little guide (originally trying to sell us postcards), but Milla despatches him with firm words: alone again we scramble through and over (along the tops of the walls in our usual method) the remains of streets and houses around the baths before emerging on the main street. This main street is still a principal artery of the old town, paved with Roman slabs, lined intermittently with columns and running to arches at either end.

We seem to be close to the centre of the Roman/Byzantine town: as well as a Roman triumphal arch at the end of the street to the theatre, there's a very ornate column standing alone (there's a local story about a king/emperor whose daughter slept up there to avoid scorpions) with a large public building attached, and nearby a Byzantine complex with a row of arches along the courtyarded front. Our "guide" described it as a Byzantine castle, but it looks nothing like a castle to us. At about this time, school is let out (primary schools, at least) and waves of infants pass us - one particularly bright 5- or 6-year old stops to chat: she is "Anan", possesses a wide English vocabulary (though no grammar - she can name things) and writes her name and those of her friends for me. Although she has the letters (some back to front, like "S" and "N"), she writes them backwards, ie. right to left (she becomes "NANA").
Boring quickly of this local colour and interaction, we wander round the Byzantine Whatever (a group of four or five men are still excavating around it) and over and through bits of buildings on the other side of the street. It's kinda odd, scrambling around a Roman wall and finding yourself in someone's private courtyard with washing strung out between Ionic capitals. Our attention is demanded by a couple of guys hanging around outside the Omar Mosqe and (facing it) the Arab baths - the baths are 600 years old, roofless, but very ornate; the mosque is unusual in that it's a converted (c. 720) temple (we can't tell if it was a church in between) - the inside is all lines of columns, some re-used, and the outside is all columns and walled-up Roman arches. The guys, of course, want a little baksheesh of (basically) standing nearby while we explored: we don't think so.

After another random wander (almost every corner turns up something worth seeing - this is a weird and amazing place), and another encounter with the infinitely-energised Anana, we emerge at an old monastery. Just a simple semi-derelict building, it's associated with the monk "Buheira" who's something of an Islamic legend - apparently Mohammed stopped off here and Buheira predicted his future. Despite this apparent fame, there's not a lot left here and at least one corner runs straight into someone's back yard. A little south, past a "Post Office"-come-"Museum" (ie. a souvenir stall) we reach the remains of the cathedral (to our old friends Sergius and Bacchus with a new third name Aontius). It's in a style we haven't seen before - solid walls inscribe a decagon inside a square building: at the centre is a circle of columns which used to support a cupola. It's pretty odd and, striking further east, we reach another complex with essentially the same design. This latter turns out to have been a temple, so it looks like that style of early church is a local phenomenon (the cathedral dates to 512/513) based on an older temple design. There's another local story that Justinian based Hagia Sofia on this design, which would explain why it's radically different from everything that went before (or since, really) but frankly they're not that similar.

Heading west again, we come to the Nabatean Gate at the eastern end of the main street: yes, the Nabateans got this far north and Bosra was one of their main cities - they obviously were busy carving out a little Arab empire about the time they were absorbed by Rome. We're into yet another zone with a different pre-Roman history (Pompey took over the areas north and west of here, but the Nabateans bribed him to piss off and not bother them - it wasn't until after Christ that the empire became the Roman province of Arabia). The gate's quite ornate, but Milla's interest is more with a donkey shut in a shed nearby - the owner unlocks the door so she can talk to it for a bit.

We walk all the way along the main Roman street, looking for mandarins to buy and meet Tim (another Australian from Beirut - we all seem to be following the same trail). Slightly past the turn-off to the theatre, we clamber down a little hole into a strange skylit underground passage which runs parallel to the street for more than 100m. Very odd, a little spooky, with strange niches in the walls, it's also an excellent place for a piss. Eventually, of course, we reach the Roman west gate (a double arch design, one of top of the other), and from there follow the roads of the modern town back around to the citadel.

We stop for a tea at a little place run by the "Obeyda" who was mentioned last night - it turns out that he also offers cheap accommodation for those who don't have student cards (though only on floor cushions). His place is a pleasant enough spot overlooking the citadel gate, and we amuse ourselves by watch an Italian tourist wandering around in shades: it's getting quite dark, and he clearly doesn't realise what a prat he looks. We opt to eat there later, after checking-in with Tim and buying a Bosra guide boko at the castle: the place turned out to be much larger and more confusing than we'd anticipated - we'll stay tonight as well, rather than pressing on to Jordan, and try to figure out what we saw today and what we missed.
When we return for our meal later there's a bit of an argument: Obeyda claims he meant a half-chicken between us, rather than each (I suspect he just ran out of chicken), but either way he manages to produce another half-chicken from somewhere and apologises by offering us infinite cups of free tea afterwards. Conversation on a wide variety of subjects (including whether we can get him a Romanian wife) reveals Obeyda to be a bit of a dickhead, and eventually we head back into the castle.
Our second evening there turns out to be quite exciting: there's an intermittent strange high-pitched noise which last night I'd assumed was a firework. We investigate, trepidatiously, and find that it comes from a number of owls hunting and hiding in the citadel. The first time that large white shadow swept overhead, screeching, inside the long backstage tunnel we were standing in . . . well, it was quite alarming (the only light is from our little torches). We also encounter a number of small frogs (the owls' quarry, presumably) and a cat (also the owls' quarry, or a rival hunter?). We spend some time in the cold following and searching for the screeching owls (they keep spotting us and moving to different parts of the complex, much quicker than we can move in the pitch dark): we're most successful with our torches off. Our best sighting was from just inside the stage as one large white owl spirals round and round just above the orchestra and seats outside, and then we retire early to bed at 10.30, still with no idea whether owls attack people.
I briefly wake at 05.00, with the morning Call to Piss (sorry, Prayer) outside, and go for a quick Prayer (sorry, Piss).