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To be honest today was a tough day on the feet. I bought some snazzy, fashionable looking Otz leather boots at Avenues Mall in Kuwait and thought they'd be ok for the walk. They would have been, except they had these fancy soles like Birkenstocks with a ridge between the ball of the foot and the toes. Well, if they fit me correctly that's where it would have been but it ended up spending most of the day cutting into the ball of my foot. That's probably because my foot was a bit smaller than the boot and it moved around a lot. Anyway, these ridges ended up causing bruises as you can see in the picture and I couldn't wait for the day to be over from that perspective.
From the point of view of the walk we spent a lot of time above the tree line today. We walked through an area that would be ski fields in the winter and it was suitably barren. The highlight in terms of landmarks was the Cedars of God forrest, which, according to one of the group members, contained the tree after which that on the Lebanese flag was modelled. Unfortunately, half of its limbs had been cut off I think because it was rather old and maybe was dying. Anyway, these were some seriously old cedars. You can see a few thick trunks in the photos, indicating they are about a thousand years old according to some on the walk. It made one think about all the significant events, according to humans, that have happened over that period... where this tree has responded only by growing a little bit taller and wider every year, seeming to recognise no other meaning to life. How humbling.
We also got to meet a famous movie director in the region, who had made a number of films popular in the Arab world. We walked this section with three locals who took us by his house on the way, where we were served fresh apples and coffee. It was quite a rural area and somehow surprising to me that someone like this would be living there - although I suppose given that it was a ski resort part of the year that may explain it. Maybe I have the wrong idea in my head of what type of lives movie directors lead :-)
Despite the high altitude, today still involved a fair amount of walking through farmland, with a large flock of goats and sheep going past on the mountainside at one point. Seeing the shepherds made me realise that there are some large contrasts in ways of life in Lebanese society. The first place I really got to see in Lebanon was downtown Beirut, a very idyllic urban setting with lots of beautiful stone architecture from the French colonial period and sophisticated people sipping coffee and shopping for fun. There are also people who spend all day scrambling across mountain sides at 1800m making sure their goats don't run away. It's easy to exclaim that the calmness in the mountains suits me more but there was a certain degree of calmness and peace downtown as well (despite the thought I kept having every 10 minutes or so that a car bomb might go off). Farming at this height also has its challenges for orchadists. You'll see a photo of an apple orchard with all the branches bound to the trunks. That's so they don't snap under the weight when the snow comes.
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