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Today's trail highlight was Tannourine Nature Reserve. I actually got cold here, and had to use my jacket! I enjoyed the thorough change of climate from Kuwait, where the searing heat of summer had only just passed. It's quite something walking outdoors and feeling like your eyes are burning, something similar to opening the door of the oven with your face too close. Here in Lebanon the weather was perfect for hiking, nice and cool. The Tannourine Nature Reserve was a peaceful area with a nice assortment of trees and rather old looking granite(?) rocks. By old I simply mean they had a quite weathered look. They also weren't large, outcrops perhaps standing 2-3m tall which to me added to the sense of age, that they might have been worn down over thousands of years.
Another memorable moment during today was meeting with yet another bunch of people firing shotguns at birds. We actually had a bit of a longer chat with one of the guys in the photos that you can see, and he seemed receptive to the idea of at least picking up his shotgun shells after himself. I had the chance to talk with one of the local girls who accompanied us on the walk yesterday about guns as well, only because she could speak English. She had a gun. She was not in the least dramatic about it when I asked her. It was a normal thing she said. A picture was starting to emerge for me of another part of Lebanese culture. Guns are part of every day life. It made me think it is like Cambodia must have been before the government crackdown. Apparently there used to be a weapons/ammo market near the Mondial centre in western Phnom Penh. People could just go there and pick up an AK47 for $150 or so. Here, on the last day, I met a local guide who was given his father's AK, who in turn had received it from his father.
Also similar to Cambodia, there was a civil war in Lebanon. This is the setting of the excellent De Niro's Game by Rawi Hage. Similar to some scenes in the book, the group leader joked once about dodging bullets whilst dashing across a track shouting 'Sniper! Sniper!'. He said he had to do this for real many years ago in Beirut. For me, this is the stuff of movies and computer games. Thinking about it, I'd have the same attachment to guns and defense skills if I or my parents had been through such trauma. A questionable source remarks that 150,000 were killed in the war, with presumably an order of magnitude more wounded. This reminds me of my realisations about post truamatic stress disorder in Cambodia. I wonder if similar research is being conducted in Lebanon. I hope so, and I hope they're going to be ok. I also hope that these people are not being preyed on by charlatans peddling non evidence based interventions such as art therapy. I hope a solid community of clinical psychologists is doing good. By the sounds of that NYT article though not enough is being done.
Inevitably along this walk we all got to talking about many things. Today was the venue for a couple of interesting topics, a new perspective on the Syrian civil war and ideas for a peaceful, prosperous future in Lebanon. Regarding Syria, to be honest I have been bamboozled about it. Those in the Western world looked on with a rush of excitement and hope when the Arab Spring swept through the region a couple of years ago. Syria and Egypt are obvious examples though of how it all went wrong. I've not really known why and I guess the distance of these places from me meant I didn't care very much. Walking with a group of Lebanese, however, meant that I was with people who did care.
I was offered a new perspective from one of them today about the cause of strife across Lebanon's eastern border. She remarked that one of the largest natural gas reserves was recently discovered in Syria, and they were planning to sell it to places like the EU with assistance from Russia. Right away I was reminded of this map showing how many Russian and US naval vessels there were in the Mediterranean recently. Quite a number of boats are on that map and this points to a situation more tense than I had thought. She continued by pointing out that the US with their recent conquests in Iraq and Afghanistan saw Syria as a competitor to their own gas and oil concerns nearby. She was careful not to accuse the US of simply starting the war to deliberately disable Syria's capacity to compete. Instead she stated that the US simply encouraged the instability during the Arab Spring into something more than it was, creating a conflict that had the result they wanted, ultimately less competition for their gas businesses. Russel Brand(!) recently expanded on the idea of the US/UK/Western governments "being indifferent systems that merely just administrate for large corporations". The point of this for me is not finding out the reason for this particular problem in the Middle East. I appreciated it for the different view I was given. All I get is Murdoch press and the BBC, with the odd article from The Guardian if I'm feeling diligent about informing myself. I never make the effort to read non Western reportage. A big part of the problem is I only understand English.
The other discussion we had was about building for Lebanon a positive, flourishing future. Yep, we covered a lot today! During this discussion one of the older gentlemen in the group joined in. We were talking about how the Lebanon Mountain Trail is a very simple idea. It's just a trail, after all. All you do is walk on it. A lot of people, let's be honest, are going that think that's a pretty boring thing to do. I hope my pictures change some of their minds! We also talked about how half of the experience of the trail is really the people you meet. The sections on this trek were mainly in areas of Xian sects, but on the last day we went past some Muslims, including a very kind young woman handing out sweets as part of her community's Eid celebrations. This trip, therefore, gave me an experience of kindness given by people from two different, old cults. That's a powerful, important truth. It makes me think about the trail as a kind of mental vaccine. One could possibly inoculate some young minds against becoming prejudiced toward their countrypeople who just happened to be from a different sect if they walked the entire LMT at some point in their childhood, receiving kindness from representatives of all sects along the way. Of course it is a ridiculous social engineering idea to propose this, but the message is valid. I came up with the idea of using a national trail as part of a recovery package for countries that have suffered under a colonial power's divide and rule strategy for subduing the populace. Walking a national trail, and more importantly meeting a whole nation's people, should provide a way to undo some of the division caused in a nation's psyche by a period of such a style of rule. It appears that Lebanon has a way to go here, however, given that the three most important government positions are assigned to separate sects.
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