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I spent Friday, my last day in Aleppo, visiting the dusty little Museum of Popular Tradition, which contains a motley assortment of weapons, clothes and kitchenware, and a couple of “tableaux”. The female mannequins, sitting on benches in the kitchen or preparing for a wedding, are neat and tidy, but the men – watching a magic lantern show and in a barber’s shop – are quite disheveled, about to fall off their chairs, with wigs askew. I had planned to visit a beautiful building that was for several centuries until the 1900’s an asylum for the mentally ill, who were treated there kindly with music, tinkling fountains and a vegetarian diet, but the guidebook gave the wrong closing day, so I missed it. Instead I spent the afternoon with my book in the park that has a lot of parched grass, quite a few trees and hundreds of benches. As it was the holy day, there were lots of families playing and picnicking under the trees. I also called in at the Baron Hotel, built in 1910 and once very posh, for a cup of mint tea in the gloomy bar and to see the room where Agatha Christie wrote part of Murder on the Orient Express (the train used to stop in Aleppo). It’s now very seedy but still expensive!
On Saturday I caught a morning bus to Tripoli. There was a lot of hanging around and document-checking at the bus station, where I got chatting to a well-travelled old Frenchman who made me feel calmer! Then about 3 hours drive (the driver and his mate chain-smoking and using mobile phones) through agricultural country to the Lebanon border point on the coast. As we got near to the sea, there were shacks selling beach towels decorated with the likes of Mickey Mouse and Che Guevara! The formalities at the border took nearly 2 hours, with the bus and documents being checked going out of Syria and again a few yards away going into Lebanon. The Frenchman and I had to change dollars into Lebanese lire at an extortionate rate to pay for the visa that we thought was free, then wait at a counter with seats for 30 officials, only one of which was occupied, while everything was checked again. He said he’d learned how to be patient while working in the Far East, and suggested we look at the granite counter – “look, here’s a bit of amazonite, and some oxides, and these little red bits are garnet …”
From there it was a short hop, via several road blocks, to Tripoli, where I’d booked a room in a hotel in the centre of the old city. But the taxi driver pretended he didn’t know where it was and drove me well out of town (while I protested that it was the wrong way) to a village where he was told firmly by a local to take me back to the centre. Then he wanted (but didn’t get) 70 dollars! The hotel was very unprepossessing, in a rubbish-strewn alley, and I had to lug my bag up 3 flights of stairs to get to it, only to be told that my room had been given to someone else. The hotel was a family concern; Granny, in a nightie, was propped on a couch; her husband sat scowling on the balcony, and the grandson was playing with a toy tank. There was a woman with a lovely smile who had no English and not much French. Eventually her multi-lingual brother, who had a very soothing voice, came in to sort things out. He offered to take me to a nearby hotel, but as this was described in Lonely Planet as “unwelcoming, and downright weird if there are only a few guests”, I decided to stay put in a different room with an inconvenient shared shower. I went out to explore and couldn’t find anything nice, so sat with my picnic tea in a park with some feral cats and a very odd man who claimed to be a tourist guide. After a very early night I went out at 6.30 the next morning to walk to the International Fairground, designed by Oscar Niemeyer, the Brasilia architect, in the 1960-‘s, but never finished because of the civil war in 1975. Now it’s quite pretty, with flowering trees between the geometric buildings that did get built – a cylindrical tower, a parabola over a walkway leading nowhere, and a shallow dome over an amphitheatre, in which every little sound, even unzipping my bag, echoed loudly. After a quick breakfast I was glad to get onto a little bus to Byblos, where I spent 3 nights. It’s a small seaside town with an old harbor beside ruins of all periods from the Ottomans back to the Phoenicians. In the 60’s people like Brigitte Bardot used to flock there. The souks have been beautifully restored but now only sell souvenirs. The highlight is “Memoires du Temps”, a museum and shop of fossil fish found in a nearby limestone quarry. There are 100 million year old ancestors of herrings, octopus, swordfish and sharks; my favourite was a fish that had just swallowed a smaller one.
I stayed at the Hotel King George, a mile or so inland up a steep hill, and named after its owner Georges, a retired French teacher. Georges is keen on DIY and as soon as I arrived he showed me the new mirror he’d just installed in the lobby, and the honeymoon suite with a bar he’d built and a Jacuzzi in the corner. The DIY probably explains why my shower didn’t drain and the room door was so difficult to lock and unlock. I had a balcony (I even had one in Tripoli, overlooking the rubbish skips!) with a view of the sea, where I had breakfast and watched the sunset while eating my picnic supper. Lunch was in a restaurant by the harbor – the mezze are affordable, but fish dishes are prohibitively expensive.
Lebanon is a much wealthier country than Syria, and the people are much more interested in “lifestyle”. There are adverts along the highway for jewellery (“Mon bijou, mon droit”!), beauty treatments and cosmetic surgery (I’m told it’s the norm in Beirut), designer clothes and lingerie, and wedding gear and venues. Even in Byblos there are dozens of beauty salons, men’s and women’s hairdressers, and shops selling evening dresses and perilously high-heeled shoes.
I went on a couple of interesting trips, driving past acres of tomatoes and bananas, to huge limestone caverns full of stalactites and stalagmites (sadly, photography was STRICTLY prohibited), and to an artists’ village, full of sculptures by the Basbous brothers, one of whom built himself a lovely little Gaudi-style house incorporating a windscreen for a window. Yesterday I took a bus to another little seaside town, Baytroun. Near the harbour there are streets of old stone houses, some crumbling, some being restored. I found a lovely beach-shack café where I sat and watched people fishing (it reminded me of Deia), then found some shade where I read my book until the recommended restaurant opened. I was lucky in Aleppo – someone had left “The Book Thief” at the hotel, and I swopped it for the book I’d just finished, and I’ve been engrossed in it. What an idyllic day!
I left Byblos early this morning and took a taxi (a luxury – I couldn’t face getting a minibus to Tripoli and another one from there) to Bcharre, up in the mountains. It was a beautiful drive with a friendly driver who had lived in Australia, so spoke English with a strange accent! The hotel here is cheap but very comfortable, and I’ve got a bath – the first and almost certainly the only one of the trip, so I’ll be making the most of it. And I’ve got a balcony again, with a view of the mountains and a few patches of rather grey snow. The taxi driver said he can’t remember a winter as warm and dry as the last one. I’m here for 3 nights before going on to Baalbek (because Jaqki said I should!) It's a funny little town, birthplace of poet/painter Gibran, a centre for exploring the Qadisha valley, full of dead cars (and car workshops!), and household shrines.
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