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DESCRIPTION OF THE SECTION
Today we went through the World Heritage listed Kadisha (saint/holy) valley, home to the Lebanese Maranite Order, a Xian sect who had retreated there after persecution in the 17th century. The valley is famous for its monasteries and hermitages. We also got a chance to see many terraces, both abandoned and still being used for agriculture. It's amazing seeing a steep mountain face one might only expect to find goats climbing on with evidence of terraces right the way up. Sometimes one would see just 4-5 small terraces in an otherwise inaccessible part of the valley, making me think how easy we have it back home with our massive wide flat plains in Australia. It would have taken rock climbing skills just to get to work in the Kadisha valley, and how they got the produce back down I don't know. Explains why the Maranites retreated there though, no one would bother to hound them out!
The highlight of this section was meeting Father Dario Escobar, an old Colombian hermit who had been living in the Hawqa hermitage (built in 1283) for 20 years. There was a very narrow track between the barbed wire fend alongside it and the stone wall of a terrace on the left - it was obvious we were coming from a different direction than the usual access route to the east. I'd never been to a hermitage before and only had an image of a spartan cave in my mind. This place obviously had a lot of funds behind it though, with solid masonry, electricity, a grotto either carved into the rock or where a cave used to be and a general sense of establishment. Outside the place itself was a vege patch, about the size of an average household's. This is because he is vegetarian and must provide food for himself only from here. He can only eat once a day at 2pm and spends 14 hours a day praying. On the way in we were told to be calm and quiet by one of the group members, who said he would see if we might be able to talk with him. So we walked around checking things out and waited to see what would happen.
Before long I heard some enthusiastic remarks being made in Arabic and a short black robed figure appeared with a long beard! Everyone excitedly walked over to meet him and you can see the photos of us. He seemed very approachable and excited to hear about what we were doing. Of course I understood nothing that was being said but he was obviously friendly and interested in us. One particularly funny moment was when a cheeky member of the group asked for a photo of him sitting amongst all the women that had come along. There was a moment during this when I noticed a little glimmer of excitement in his face and eyes which I don't think I need to explain. It was great.
It's really hard to explain the majestic setting of the valley. You really need to go there and experience the feeling of being enveloped in so much mountain scenery. Because you are halfway up a fairly high mountain and walking through a valley you have a constant spectacular view. You really must go there and breathe the fresh air. You can see in the photos a place we came across which was a large cave that had a town living in it. The people in it, however, were killed in an act of treachery. The town was literally flushed out by redirecting a river through the cave. As an act of contrition for his crime, the man that did it set up the Hawqa hermitage. There is history in this valley everywhere.
MAPS
As you can see in the photos of the last section, the LMT has maps. They are made by Ecodit and I really like them. They were lucky enough to get a lot of data from the Lebanese military, such as contours and town locations. They have colours showing land use classes as well, useful for gaining a sense of the kind of environments one will be walking through for a particular section. The only problem that stuck out for me, and it wasn't a very bit one, was the symbology for the LMT trail itself. It was a nice obvious red line but there were three types of trail from memory. One was just normal trail through bushland, there was another type for trails that went along public roads and another type that went along dirt roads. These had, respectively, a thin white strip either side of the red line and a dashed white strip. The white strip could have been thicker in my opinion and perhaps it was in their software for producing the map but came out a bit differently from the printer. Apart from this I found the maps very informative and the elevation profile was great too. It was a nice professional touch having the data sources declared on each map too.
So, that's the paper maps. They have also made a web map using Google Maps but it leaves much to be desired. Route sections are not clear and start/finish towns are not highlighted. Also, they should put placemarks for the locations of guesthouses and one or two attractions along each route, such as the location of Hawqa hermitage. Another way to address the issue of having a webmap is just to abandon the idea altogether and simply upload the route to Google Maps and OpenStreetMap, then people will be able to see everything within these maps without having to go to a special web address. There is an added benefit of publicity for the trail since any map using Google Maps or OpenStreetMap as a basemap will show the trail. I will be adding the LMT, therefore, to both of these maps. It seems I won't be able to do it on Google Map Maker at the moment though as they seem to have locked Lebanon for editing, presumably something to do with the strife in Syria. Openstreetmap is better anyway!
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Edit: I have now done this for OSM. Took about 4 hours but worth it in the end :-) I mainly used the KML from the LMT webmap but also added in changes from my GPX tracks of the route we took, because there have been updates made to the original trail.
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KUWAIT MAPPING MEETUP 4
By the way, in related news I have organised Kuwait Mapping Meetup 4 this Wednesday 30/10/13. Tchi-Tchi shisha cafe, Al Kout Mall, Fahaheel (29.081034 lat ,48.142505 long). As always, this is a chance to have a casual chat about spatial things - maps, surveying, data(bases), coding, geostatistical analysis and, importantly, map comedy. We found that it was good for discussion last time to have some people attend that were not part of the mapping industry. Please feel free to invite friends/colleagues who do not make maps professionally. Looking forward to seeing you there!
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- comments
Tabsoun great photo collection from google man
Tabsoun google man before the jump :)