Road Trip 1.0

September 14, 2009:

Apologies for the lack of updates, our harried schedules, grunginess, and general exhaustion have made coherent writing even more difficult than usual.

Today we set out to prove that one can have a pleasant vacation in Lebanon with only a car, a vague knowledge of road geography, and two woefully incomplete maps to get us by. Our route was a simple one: an early lunch in Byblos after a stroll through the souq, and a trip to the Cedars by way of Batroun.

We had some history on our side, as I had personally taken this backdoor trip from the Cedars (al-Arz) through the Qadisha Valley and the quaint, relatively deserted, but largely adorable little town of Douma to Batroun. Whether this was enough to work our way successfully through the baffling trickle of country roads and maze of dead ends in the tiny Lebanese mountain villages (Dhayiat) was questionable.

The success of even this early stage was by no means guaranteed. In order to have a bit more freedom (and potentially a place to sleep in time of need) we actually rented a car in Beirut – which meant that we had to navigate the series of one way streets, confusing highway routes, and sadistic Lebanese drivers, who operated with the cruel efficiency of barracuda when their right of way appears threatened. Fortunately, we had a secret weapon: Tam. Her fearlessness and naughty sense of joy at being able to operate in a country with no real traffic laws made her a natural on the streets of Beirut, and even in Mount Lebanon, where the narrow cliffside roadways make for frequent games of chicken between inattentive Lebanese drivers (often on their cell phones) and whoever is driving in the opposite direction.

Though parking in Byblos (Jbeil) was an adventure in itself (Tam parked illegally in a bank parking lot), the rest of our stay was a series of half-victories and second guesses. I still maintain that the old part of Byblos may be one of my favorite places in the world, though the fact that none of the restaurants in the souq open before 1 pm was less than promising for the remainder of our trip, particularly since we were not sure what we’d find in the mountains on the second leg of our trip.

After getting lost a number of times in Batroun itself, we finally fixed on a single road that headed in the general direction of the mountains and started driving. Through some inconceivable twist of fate, it was actually the correct road, and we began our haphazard wind up towards Tannourine and, we thought, the stunning little town of Bcharre and the romantic bungalows of the Cedars.

Our maps were sufficient for driving between coastal cities, since anyone not suffering acute directional dyslexia or vertigo couldn’t miss them if they tried. Our problems began to surface as we made our way deeper into the mountain and noticed that the roads on which we allegedly were driving didn’t actually coincide with those on the map, and that most of the roads that we encountered were very apparently absent from the maps. We knew that our destination was “that way…ish,” but we had little more to go on other than fuzzy memories of old SINARC trips.

After a brief stop in Douma for coffee at the one tiny restaurant in operation (with cheeseburgers!), we continued on down the highway through the valleys – passing leafy creek banks, waterfalls, mountain orchards, and beautiful cliffs on the way.

Only it was not to be. After getting lost a number of times, looping in on ourselves, and finding ourselves heading back to Batroun, we decided to bite the bullet and make our way back to the coast and off to Tripoli. The fact that I am typing this post in a hotel room in Batroun might indicate how successful our trip to Tripoli was (it reminded me a lot of a tiny, slightly cleaner Cairo), but that’s a different post.

More to come, stay tuned!