Blogs from Tripoli, Lebanon, Middle East

My Turkish dorm mate tagged along to Tripoli, we 1st had breakfast at the local Lebanese pizza joint, ummm so good! We walked to the Helou station which was only 5 minutes away, we found the Connexion bus and it left in 10 minutes, they leave every hour I think, a very popular and busy route. Big traffic we hit on the way out of the city, we skirted the coastline, Mediterranean is so blue and beautiful,a few men trying their luck fishing along the coast, then we climbed top the mountains and then back down to the coast, in only an hour we are in Tripoli. We took awhile to get our bearings, we took the LP while standing next to this jewellery shop next door from the bus station, we got shoved to the ... read more

We bussed down nearly 3000m to sea level and wandered into the small fishing town of Byblos. We were promptly disappointed to find out that it was in fact more expensive to stay here than even Beirut, but we decided to stick it out for one night. After wandering around the old city (old is so relative in the Middle East because it could mean 40, 400 or over 4000 years old!), shot some amazing sunset photos at the old Crusader castle ruins right by the ocean and relaxed with a nice fresh fish (Dorado) dinner! At night, we decided to hit the town and ran into a joint stag/stagette for a couple and had a tasty beer with the party. In the morning, we decided to pick up our roots again and head north to ... read more

Ok, so a brief update I think. Mary has been beavering away at her blog entry for almost an hour so I suspect she'll be done soon - I'll make it snappy. In fact, even better, I'll make it themed. Middle Eastern Food: An Odyessy. Tripoli is supposedly the home of Arabic sweets and this has certainly been a theme of our stay here. After this entry we are heading to Le Palais, a tea-shop with an extensive range of baklava, cakes, ice cream and chocolate. This will be the fourth time we have paid it a visit (though we have only indulged in sweets once) and we are quite familiar with the staff. Yesterday we had ice cream - all through the Middle East you can get the most delicious flavours. The standard one - ... read more

Dan says... This trip started out with a lovely little jaunt down Beirut's equivalent of state highway one. The open road driving here is the undisputed worse either of us has seen. If a car is passing a car, which is already passing another car and the only option for this first car is to drive on the extreme wrong side of the road to get past both cars at once, even if there is another car coming the other way, provided it is smaller than the first car, then its all go! After half an hour or so we managed to find a hardly used little coastal road down by the water. Byblos was a cool little town of paved streets, outdoor cafes and ancient ruins in a fishing village setting. Can imagine it could ... read more

Apparently Che used to summarize the past month in his diary, so I'll try to do the same about my 2 weeks in Lebanon. This should serve to go some ways towards satisfying those who have requested "a bulleted summary" of where I've been and what I've done. Lebanon is a beautiful country, with mountains seemingly rising right out of the sea, a gorgeous coastline, and great hiking. The people in Beirut are cosmopolitan and indeed one feels like in someplace like America rather than the middle east while in Beirut -- that is, until you notice the bullet holes in the buildings. Accordingly, some elite locals apparently claim to be "Phoenician" and not Arab. Prices in Lebanon came as quite a shock after I had gotten used to the prices in Syria and I ended ... read more