Leba-Non ! (Battling to Beirut…)

Occasional view from near my hotel...

But more often it looked like this...!!

I spent two days “trapped” in the Francis hotel, watching the rain teeming down from the comfort of my suite… Yes, a suite…!! There was only one other guest that I met from time to time, so we had the entire hotel to ourselves… I had been given a two bedroom suite, complete with kitchenette and sitting room…!!

There was no internet reception in my suite, so I spent most of the time in the reception area, working on the last of my Palmyra posts, and chatting to the friendly day and night shift managers…

Not the hotel swimming pool... But close...!! The parking lot through which I slogged to get to reception...

By the second day, they were sharing their lunch with me, and I was getting the usual “tea treatment”…!!

Occasionally, the sun would shine brightly, making me consider getting onto the bike and zooming off to the Lebanese border, which was barely 20 kilometres away, but just as quickly, the cloud cover would descend on the hilltops around us, and the rain would lash down again…

Rain had been very scarce this year, so for the locals, it was all good news…

I received an email from Trevor and Chental who were in Amman, bemoaning the weather they had woken up to that morning… And who could blame them… Not the kind of thing that bikers look forward to…!!

Check out their story on  http://trevsblogg.blogspot.com/

Take it easy guys, and remember to take your patience pills before you get to the Egyptian Border…!!

Trevor and Chental's bike in Amman... The Big Fella winced when I showed him this photo...!!

Breakfast was a grand affair... This one included an omelette...!!

Last photo in Syria... Until I had cleared the border posts, cameras were a no-no...!!

Logging on to www.yr.no, the weather program that has governed my movements for the past ten months, I saw that there was a tiny window of opportunity which I knew I would have to take advantage of…

It showed clear skies over northern Lebanon and in Beirut, but rain midway between these two areas…

I left the hotel as early as I could this morning, and noticed that there was snow on the Big Fella’s cover…!! It had snowed during the night, but an early morning drizzle had seen it all melt away…

I was at the border a half hour later, having made an ultra careful start avoiding a few patches of ice on the narrow, steep and winding roads from the village back to the motorway…

I was assisted by a very helpful Syrian official at the border, and escorted through the various processes it takes to exit Syria, which included a SP550.00 “Thanks for Leaving” Tax…!! Go figure…!! You have to pay to leave the country…!

What if you didn’t have a good time…? Do you get a discount…??

Tourist: “Excuse me, sir… It rained like hell for the past few days, and I was really cold and uncomfortable… I am only prepared to pay SP250.00 for the privilege of leaving Syria…!!”

Border Official: “Oh really…!! Well, over there, next to the Police Station, is a small cell, from where you can reconsider your offer…!!”

Options available: Pay the money; get the hell out…!!

The Lebanese border post is about a kilometre from the Syrian one, and is reached by riding down a narrow reed lined road, and through a small village, where trucks were being offloaded and reloaded, and bags repacked by people who had just exited the Syrian border post… All very suspicious…!!

Riding between the borders... Syria and Lebanon...

The Lebanese border post was like something from a Mad Max movie… Fire were burning in oil drums, thick smoke curling up into the cold morning air, puddles of water, mud, litter, and folk who looked like they had just exited a refugee camp…!!

The names “Lebanon” and “Beirut” have been etched in our minds as places of war, mayhem and upheaval, and are accepted synonyms for such… And with good reason…!!

Within minutes of my arrival, a grubby little man tried to scam me for Third Party Insurance, insisting he was an agent, and the cost was $75.00…

I took my time looking him up and down; from his two mis-matched shoes to the dirty clothes he was wearing…

“You look more like an escaped convict than an Insurance Agent…!” I told him…

I finally found a slight less grubby agent, who confirmed the price was $50.00, and showed me the certificate to prove it…

Then it was on to Immigration, where I was ushered into a back room where half a dozen army officers sat, and asked a barrage of questions…

“Where you from…?”

“Why you want to come to Lebanon…?” (Had a difficult time explaining that one after the scenes outside…!!)

I had seen a price list for visas on the wall outside the office, and noticed that a 48 hour transit visa was free of charge, and taking into consideration my first impressions, I figured that a transit visa was just the ticket for me… If the rest of Lebanon was anything like this border post, I wanted to get in and out of the country as quickly as possible… I even considered bypassing Beirut and heading straight for the Syrian border on the road to Damascus…!! As it turned out, it was a good thing I didn’t…!!

The question that really got the officers agitated, was that I could not give them an address in Lebanon where I could be traced to… (In the event I killed an Insurance Agent by mistake, I suppose…!!)

The issuing of a visa was impossible without this bit of information… I stood my ground, explaining that I had no idea where I would be spending the night, but was pretty sure that it would be somewhere in Beirut…

Typical roadside decorations in Lebanon...

With an exasperated sigh, the officer in charge indicated to his junior officers that they should go ahead and give me a transit visa… With a wave of his hand, he dismissed me from his exalted presence, and minutes later I was through the final checkpoint, and into the dustbin of the Middle-East…

I say this with kindness, as I have seen dustbins that are a lot cleaner than the countryside near the border post…!!

Bags of garbage were strewn alongside the road for kilometres… The place stank to high heaven, and I wondered how bad it must get in summer…!! In between all this, vegetables grew in gay abandon, oblivious of the noxious waste all around them… I made a mental note to avoid salads while in Lebanon…

On the highway that runs down the coast, I was amazed to see the Mediterranean in so foul a mood… Waves,…(yes waves…!!) rolled into the shoreline, smashing into the rocks, and sending spray high into the air… The sea was a dirty brown, and all manner of plastic bags and flotsam was thrown around on its surface…

Parked near the beach, North of Tripoli... Had it rained rubbish here...??

On land, the sight was no prettier… Burnt out car wrecks lined the road, piles of old tyres lay in heaps between them…

It looked like a war-zone, which judging by the amount of gun-toting soldiers lurking about, was exactly what it was…!!

They manned security checkpoints, which were basically areas where traffic was diverted into a single lane between sandbagged barricades, manned by surly looking guys in camouflaged uniforms in an assortment of colours, cigarettes dangling from their lips…

Back home, Sgt-Major Maritz would be doing somersaults in his grave…!!

Ducked into this wash-bay to escape the downpour...

To improve matters further, it began to rain… Not a drizzle, mind you, but a cold driving rain that brought visibility down to barely a few metres…

I barreled off the highway at the first service station I saw, and parked in their wash bay, while I waited for the cloudburst to pass over…

Then I spent a pleasant half hour sitting in traffic in Tripoli, while constant rain fell…

It gave me an opportunity to pass judgment on Lebanese drivers… My final analysis: I wouldn’t trust them with my wheelbarrow…!!

It would seem that Lebanon is the graveyard of all old models of Mercedes Benz… I could hardly believe how many 230 E’s, dating back to the 80’s, were part of the traffic flow…!!

Caught in the traffic...and the rain... Tripoli, Lebanon...

Just before Beirut, the sun came out, and I missed the turning which would have taken me to the northern limits of the city, where I had decided to look for a bunker to stay in… (Er… That should read “hotel”… Slip of the tongue…!!)

Santa features on many billboards here... With 20% of the population being Christian, I guess that was to be expected... Or was it...??

Having been shoved out of my lane by a Lunatic Lebanese in a taxi, I ended up near the port, and tried to work my way through a jumble of narrow streets until I found a main road… This led directly to a military outpost where two soldiers came running out to tell me that I was not allowed anywhere near the entrance to the building on my left… It was one of the government offices, barricaded by huge concrete structures…

The soldiers were joined by another guy with a shoulder holster in which sat a Nickel Plated Colt Python…

“Nice…!” I said, pointing to it… “That a Colt…?”

“Yes,..” he said proudly, pushing out his chest and turning side on so I could get a better look… “You like…??”

“Yes, it’s a great handgun…!! Is there a hotel around here somewhere…?” I said changing the subject quickly… I realised that talk of guns and weapons might not be in my best interests, considering that I was the only unarmed person in the immediate vicinity…!!

Thanks for the timely warning....!! I'll just slow down a bit, maybe change gears... Oops...too late...!!

It took me another two hours to finally locate the hotel he had advised me to try, saying it was one of the cheaper ones he knew…

At $90.00 for the room, and a further $9.00 for a breakfast that wouldn’t satisfy a chicken, I’d hate to have experienced one of the more expensive ones that he might have known…

I have racked my brain to find something positive to say about Lebanon and Beirut, but have come up empty… I guess it must have been beautiful in days gone by, as it was long known as the “Paris of the Middle East”… The only thing it now has in common with Paris is its prices…!! Considering what you see around you, the prices of almost everything are unbelievably high…!!

I decided that Lebanon would only get the $50.00 Insurance and a further $99.00 for the hotel out of me… I had enough fuel on board to get me to Damascus, and when I checked into the Brazilia Hotel, I advised the manager that I would be crossing over to Syria the next day…

I have to admit that the Brazilia Suites was a very comfortable place to stay...

“That is if the road is open, my friend…!! It has been closed for two days because of the snow…!!”

“You kidding me…!!” I almost shouted…

“No, no… Many cars and trucks are still stuck up there…!!”

I thought of the transit visa stamped in my passport, “48 hours only” in bold red letters written over it…

This could get very interesting, I later thought to myself, as I stood looking out of the window of my room, seeing clouds massing on the mountains, in which direction the border post was located…

Just how “interesting”, I would find out the next day…!!

©GBWT 2010