24.01.10:

Before you could say supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, I was on the coach heading to the Lebanese border. Again, Lebanon has a bit of a bad rap when it comes to popular opinion. I’m of the age when an untidy bedroom would be described as ‘looking like Beirut’. It’s a sad (and yet achingly familiar) tale of three peaceful religions sporadically showing the world just how peaceful they are by brutally murdering each other. Lebanon’s civil war raged for over a decade, and Israel is more than happy to test out its swanky new rockets and helicopter gunships every now and again at the first sign of trouble.

Lebanon therefore finds itself between a rock and a hard place, which makes it all the more remarkable that it still manages to be an attractive and inviting place to visit. It’s like a hardened guerilla fighter who can also dance like Fred Astaire. And what makes Lebanon such a great place for me? Not the skiing, not the swanky bars or the parade of bling that passes for downtown Beirut these days… but the FOOD. My god, the food. I’m tempted to make another League Table but just in regards to food – as Mandy keeps telling me, it’s all about the food.

Yum yum.

On the way into Lebanon, the guy sitting behind me was possibly the most annoying human being that I have ever had the misfortune to meet. As I typed up my blog, he sat with his head wedged in between my seats, inches from my ear, breathing loudly and totally invading my personal space. If that wasn’t enough to be more irritating than a shampoo made of lice, he insisted on trying to speak to me, not in a friendly let’s-discuss-the-tennis kind of way, but in a I-know-you-don’t-speak-a-word-of-Arabic-but-I’ll-continuously-ask-you-questions-in-Arabic-anyway kind of way. The kind of guy who once he had discovered an approximation of your name, would call it every five seconds, and then when you turned around, he would smile and say ‘hello’. He had the mentality of a hyperactive six-year-old but was nowhere near as entertaining. Then he took out his phone. I rolled my eyes because I knew what was coming next. Crap music, dull photos…oh god, here we go.

I’m not a photo person. I never have been, never will be. I like TV, movies, video… I like my images to mooooooooooove. Yes, I’ll politely flick through your wedding album, but don’t except me to enjoy it – I’d much rather watch the video, even if your choice of wedding song sucked more than a pinhole in a spaceship. And here was this guy tapping me on the goddamn shoulder every thirty seconds to show me another picture on his phone of his goddamn friends who I don’t know and even if I did know, I wouldn’t want to see pictures of. Then he showed me pictures of his house. HE SHOWED ME A PICTURE OF HIS TELLY. He then smiled at me for approval, like I should be excited that he owned a telly or something, I don’t know?

Assuming he had a mental health problem, which is nothing to be ashamed about but I’m not a psychologist and I can’t speak Arabic, so I could do nothing for him (if you’re physically injured, don’t expect me to sit there while you bleed all over me) so I headed to the back of the bus to chat with the gang of Poles who were also on their way to Beirut for the day. Unfortunately for them, they had a malfunctioning Syrian wally annoying the hell out of them too. I guess this kind of behaviour passes for normal around these parts.

One of the Polish girls, Anna, had the misfortune to be utterly gorgeous. While the western way to deal with someone with this problem is to get them drunk and take advantage, the middle-eastern way is to stand over them so they cower like a cat in a corner and tell them in broken English that you love them and that they should kiss you. Over and over and over again. For TWO HOURS. There was no stopping him – he was like Pepe-Le-Pew.

Even when I got his mate to explain to him that Anna was married to the guy she was sitting next to (for all he knew, she might have been), that his behaviour was completely out of order and that she wasn’t a fellow skunk, she was a cat who had accidentally had a white stripe painted down her back, he still refused to bugger off. What I found particularly infuriating was the way these Arabic men seem to think that this behaviour was somehow appropriate, whereas if I pulled 1% of this stuff on an Arabic woman, I’d be lucky to escape the situation with my head still attached.

Eventually he disappeared and since the Poles were up for a mooch around Beirut, when we got there, we decided to join forces. We were still all smarting from the border guard refusing to give us our free transit visas and charging us $15 for a month visa (of which we were all planning to use one day).

Crossing the mountains that separate Lebanon from Syria, we passed through a full-on blizzard and I found myself thanking my mum and Lorna Brookes profusely in my head for my new coat. We descended on the capital around 3pm.

After travelling on my own for so long, it was amusing for me to now be hanging around with eight people, all of whom had to be consulted if any group decision was to be made. It was raining out, so I (characteristically) suggested that we go to the pub, but they wanted to go on a walking tour of the city, so that’s what we did. In the rain.

We walked from their backpackers in the east of town, all the way over to the Ras Beirut side in the west. If you can just ignore the refugee camps on the outskirts, Beirut is just like any other European city – give or take the few buildings with big blast holes in them – it’s got a central business district with shiny new buildings, it’s got an old bit which houses the nice bars and it’s got pavements, traffic lights, underpasses, business as usual. If it had been a sunny day, it would have been a nice walk, but the fact it was raining cats and dogs put a bit of a dampener on things.

The Poles were a top bunch – Bart and Matthew kept me entertained as we wandered the city streets, running under verandas whenever the rain went from drizzle to monsoon. Eventually (after a kebab or two), we settled down in a bar for a couple of drinks. Very expensive drinks. If you want to guarantee your position in my overall League of Nations to be high, please don’t overcharge me for my alcohol. I haven’t the heart to tell Mandy that’s the real reason Australia is not in my top 5. But worse things happen at sea, and with the excellent food on offer, there is nothing stopping me coming back here, or recommending it to others (bring your own drinks, though).

My bus back to Syria was leaving at midnight, and later I returned to the backpackers with the Poles to pick up my bag. I was hoping to sit with them in reception until their friends arrived (separate taxis) but the cow at the PENSION AL-NAZIH wouldn’t let me, even though it was dark and lashing down with raining outside. Yeah, I guess I should have expected that from a place called the Nazi Hotel.

So I made my way through the storm to the bus station (eating yet another kebab on the way) and at around 2.30am, I found myself at the Syrian border. I had a day-pass slip in my passport, which I assumed meant that I didn’t have to buy a new visa. FOOL!

God I HATE border guards. So after taking out my re-entry slip (and it disappearing into the ether) the border people demanded another $52 out of me. I almost burst into tears. The swines. I argued the toss, but after half-an-hour they had completely stonewalled me – no visa, no entry. I would be leaving first thing in the morning for Turkey, but there was nothing that I could do. Syria has now dropped a LONG way in my world rankings. Don’t pull this kind of stuff on a tourist in the middle of the night, it’s just not cricket.

I paid up, getting a $2 discount by telling them I was Irish.

Drat and double drat.

I would later discover that as my bus was fighting through the torrential rain, an Ethiopian Airliner crashed into the sea just off the coast of Beirut. What a waste.