Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Purty trees and dead gunmen

Sightseeing 'round Libnan was twofold awesome. Sure, there was the ridiculous scenery and the fact that a large majority of the country is the perfect mountains-next-to-sea blend. It was honestly one of the most beautiful countries I've ever been to, and I was blindsided by how fantastic some of the scenery was. Although many Arabs come as tourists to Lebanon, I'd never heard a single thing about it before beauty-wise, only negative descriptions of the violence and political problems. It's a big misnomer to pigeonhole Lebanon as a purely "Arab" country though, and that's as far as I'll go into any sort of political discussion on the matter. On to stories.

Oh yeah, the second fold of awesome. I'll get to that in a bit. First, pretty things.

Old Roman ruins by the sea in the city of Tyre, in southern Lebanon. Most of the more famous ruins in Lebanon that I visited were of the Romany-columny variety, with remains of old temples, city walkways, necropoli, and even a chariot racing stadium.


View from one of (or The) largest and best preserved hippodromes EVER. This is from near the center of the stadium. The fuzzy triangle in the background is a portion of the amphitheater seating that once fit about 20,000 people hopped up on classical NASCAR. Chariot races, from what I hear, often involved pretty spectacular crashes, especially at either end of the elliptical track as the chariots skeetered around the non-banked curves. I relaxed in the shade under one of the seating areas (amazing similar to modern stadium seating in acoustics and feel) and imagined watching a specawesometacular combination of NASCAR, figure skating, jousting, and gladiators all mixed into one sport. Oh, and there was hibiscus growing in the stadium (the red thing ruining my stadium picture). I wonder if Lebanese drink hibiscus tea as much as Egyptians do.

Cedar tree in the Chouf Cedar Reserve, up in the northern area of Lebanon in the mountains. Lebanese cedars make for some good wood - these cedar forests are apparently mentioned in the Bible (somewhere in the chapter about trees) and traders used to transport uber-cedar-lumber all over the region, including down to Egypt for use in their boats 'n shizzle. Some of the larger ones are over 1000 years old - this one was just a mere 300 or so years old though. After I learned about the way older ones, this one was still visually pleasing but just not as cool...sorry, whippersnapper.

So, onto the second fold of awesomeness. The stories we heard from random people we ran into (our driver buddy, a ranger/guide in the forest, etc.) were jaw-dropping to my grew-up-in-a-stable-country mind. The first was a cell-phone video our driver showed us while we were at a rest stop or something. It was a wounded Hezbollah fighter sitting against a wall, saying what were close to his last words, filming everything around him, including a dead fighter right next to him. At first I was curious why our driver would have downloaded this off whatever news website onto his phone, and temporarily geeked out wondering about the bandwidth available from his network provider and whether they had 3G, and how long it would have taken to download the video file.

Turns out one of his buddies got the video directly off the phone of the Hezbollah guy, who our driver buddy and posse had fought in their neighborhood during the recent conflict in early 2008 when Hezbollah took over parts of Beirut. Our buddy relayed this fact with minimal emotion or expectation of reaction, just totally matter of fact, like he was saying "actually, this ISN'T butter, despite your belief."

Later on, while walking through the forest with a ranger describing what baby cedar trees look like, he paused in a section of forest, smiled, and whipped out his cell phone. He then played a recording of some staticky panicked yelling and gunfire, started talking to our driver buddy in Arabic, then repeated the conversation to us, in English. The audio was of some Hezbollah gunmen who for some reason were fighting their way into the cedar forests, near where the ranger and his peeps live (and near where we were standing). The panicking was from the gunmen as they were all getting killed and driven out of the forest. Ranger Rambo beamed as he described how he and his posse defended their land, and it almost made me feel warm and fuzzy (from killing enemies) too, so effervescent and contagious was his pride.

A scene from another cedar forest, which pretty much fits my definition of textbook beautiful. A little weird to think people were getting shot at around here earlier this year. I really admire how so many Lebanese deal with the constant instability and just deal with events as they occur, without sensationalizing the violence that seems so intense in my mind. Driver-buddy was talking about how, since his people live in the suburbs in the mountains around Beirut, they were safe when Israeli warships off the coast of Beirut were firing missiles into the capital during the recent war. What did he and his neighbors do during the attack? Sat on their roofs and watched the rockets flying through the air, like fireworks.


A scene from near Sidon, back in the southern part of Lebanon again, what one of the contractors in my office refers to as "Hezbollah-land". Without degenerating into some crappy geopolitical history lesson, the south is where Hezbollah is most active and has the most support, since they were the Lebanese fighting off the Israeli invasions from the south, as well as firing rockets into Israel. There are martyr memorials all over the place of young men killed in fighting (possibly by Israelis, possibly by Ranger Rambo). Hooray sniper-shot pictures from a moving vehicle with tinted windows!

Diversity. Lotta Christians, lotta Muslims in Lebanon, and being pretty ignorant about who's who, I never knew who to salam-alekum or who to, um, hallelujah or whatever. But in the south, it's predominantly Muslim so yay less potential awkwardness when greeting people! Amusingly, since the little Arabic I know is mainly Egyptian colloquial, a few people actually looked at me funny when I tried to talk to them and asked if I was Egyptian. Even weirder, I felt a pang of pride and often replied "well I do live in Egypt". Holy crap were people friendly though, and they barely even tried to rip me off as a tourist! Very refreshing.

Brain is obviously mushifying now. Suffice to say Lebanon is awesome and I will definitely visit again provided all is relatively stable. As cool as it is to see shiny automatic weapons every few dozen kilometers on the road and tanks scattered throughout the city, I don't really have any huge urge to see any of the military in action.



1 comment:

Sally said...

I like the pez dispenser in your photo :)