Lebanon light hearted and fun--at least on the surface

To subscribers: this is the first travel writing I've put up on the site -- though the site was supposed to be dedicated to travel. Unpublished elsewhere so may be full of unedited junk.

As the sparse, scrubby fields of the Bekaa Valley and the misted out brownish smudge of mountains called the Anti-Lebanon Range that frame it to the east flow past the tour bus window, it occurs to me that this vehicle is on the road to Damascus, at least in theory.

Wasn’t there somebody in history or legend who’d had a change of heart on the “road to Damascus”? I rack my brains for the literary or Biblical reference—was it Paul or Saul? I ask around the bus if anyone can produce the reference, but no one can. I consider asking our voluble guide Abbas (“That’s like the Swedish popgroup ABBA with an S”) but he is far away at the front, delivering an unstoppable monologue.

“There are the tents of bedouins,” thunders Abbas in his amplified, already powerful voice. They are not Lebanese, he informs us, and had come to do the harvest.

Would I or anyone else have a great revelation or change of heart on this trip? In the event, I’d have to resign myself to something less--I couldn’t milk the Biblical metaphor at all! But that didn’t prevent me from experiencing a whole flurry of minor revelations about this oddly unbalanced but amiable place.

Taking advantage of a 10-day holiday break at the Muslim climax of Eid al Adha, I headed to the smallest, most complicated Arab country (recently described as “wartorn”) rather than the sunny in-season beaches within shooting distance--Sri Lanka, the Maldives and Kerala to name a few. Actually Lebanon has quite a few fine beaches as well, but I saw few swimmers cutting the turquoise in November. Why I went I can’t quite say but it had something to do with wanting to reduce the huge amount of ignorance I have about the broader context of the Middle East heretofore seen primarily from a sand-bound perspective.

In addition, since a gimpy back limits my heroics—I thought a small country – not more than 100 k in length --might suit me best. In any case, I found Lebanon to be manageable, stimulating and fun at least on the surface.

Some macro impressions. First the fear factor: Even though no major violence has happened in Lebanon for years, that is following the Hariri assassination and Syrian exit, peace and tranquility in this land, as Neil MacFarquhar points out in his recent book on the Middle East (in a title too long to quote) are rarely to be found. Indeed, the suggestion of a new crisis regarding the outcome of the UN sponsored Hariri Tribunal was in the news. Individual Lebanese I talked to seemed cautiously optimistic, but then again, as one said, “We have to be.”

No need, however, to worry about the weather. It was almost as blazing as the Gulf – downright summery, even up in the hills. But as a Lebanese citoyen told me, there’s a warming trend in Lebanon as everywhere else.

What’s next in importance for the tourist? Food! Here again no worries. Almost all the decent food in the Middle East is a spinoff from Lebanese or Syrian. So if you like lentil soup and shish taook in Dubai or Doha, you’re not going to be disappointed with the genuine article in Beirut. I expected to find schwarma stands all over the country, but in fact only saw one or two – I did have one superb chicken schwarma a la Libanaise though it cost double the Dubai price.

Some regional comparisons: Lebanon is roughly at the same level of economic development as Jordan though the country seems less dynamic than booming Turkey. Beirut is much livelier and cosmopolitan than safe, orderly Amman, less historically dense and atmospheric than Cairo but much easier to put up with than the Egyptian capital due to the latter’s wall-to-wall touts and incessant demands for baksheesh. Overall, Lebanon seems less “third world” than Egypt as well – though there are world-class slums in South Beirut and the Palestinian refugee camps. Though these contrast dramatically with the very wealthy quarters of the same town, Beirut still seems modern, upbeat and civilized. Prices in Lebanon are very reasonable ($77 per night at the Mayflower, a 4 star hotel), though services can seem expensive to the Gulf resident because unlike in the Gulf, Lebanese citizens themselves perform these services and not cheap foreign labor.

Lebanon is freer and more outspoken than any other Arab country I’ve seen (and indeed the Lebanese confirmed my impression and are proud of this freedom) though there is only one English-language newspaper, The Daily Star. The friendly welcome so typical of other Middle Eastern countries I’ve visited is very much out in force in Lebanon as well, as is a fair amount of price gouging and (unfortunately) good old fashioned chicanery. Overall, however, the Lebanese that I met were (with one exception, see below) reliable, trustworthy and articulate in a variety of languages.

They are also Francophones to a degree you wouldn’t believe. So ubiquitous is French in fact that I found myself speaking it nearly everywhere, in taxis, hotels, and on tours with French tourists. It was a nice unexpected linguistic bonus for this old student of French and onetime Francophile. The Lebanese seem to have adopted en masse a French cultural alter ego so that wherever you go you’re sure to see some vestige of France such as the blue & white street signs (“Rue de Hamra”), as well as patisseries , traiteurs, etc. and a marked preference for French over English in the names of restaurants and hotels. There is also a respectable effort at simulating one of ~France's greatest contributions to civilizaton--street cafe life. The reason for this? France has a long history of intervention in Lebanon, most recently after World War II. Alien invaders they might have been yet as Catholics their cultural affinities with the Christian segments of Lebanese society seem to have left a deep imprint. In addition, many Lebanese of all sects were educated in French schools that still exist. In any case, Lebanese francophony provided a pleasant cultural diversion for me and revived my interest in French literature as I browsed the shelves of French bookstores in Beirut. (The first one I went into had a copy of Houllebecque’s latest Goncourt-winning novel La Carte et Le Territoire plus a Le Clezio that I was looking for).

But what about the tours? What about the tourism? What about the fun? There was plenty of that to be had in Lebanon at a reasonable price and with moderate effort yet I only succeeded in booking one full day of tours to famous and great sites. My first tour to the coastal archetypal town Byblos was a disaster due to a taxi driver who was either insane or a total cheat. He told me I had only an hour in that incredibly ancient place, maybe the world’s first city. I was there long enough to understand very little—fortunately one hour among old stones is my limit anyway; the surrounding souks were more enticing, but alas! The lying crook tricked me back to Beirut (where we had a hell of an argument over how much I owed him. I actually won the argument yet lost a half day).

Next on the list was Balbec, not the fictional birthplace of Proust's alter ego Marcel in another book whose title is too long, but the legendary Roman ruins close to the Syrian border. I tried to sign up on the day of Eid itself – but it was fully booked, so I had to wait. In the meantime, I booked hotel taxis at exorbitant rates (since there are no city tours) to take me to Beirut legends such as the old Green Line and Palestinian refugee camps. The guidebooks warned against visiting the latter places (without a local contact of some kind) so although interested in them I remained cautious while being driven through Sabra and Shatila camps, scenes of the notorious massacres in 1982. I must admit that the human density of the camps, as revealed by a superficial drive through, exerted a strange kind of attraction--similar to the lurid squalor that had fascinated me in pre-Capitalist Shanghai in 1986. I walked around for a half hour or so in Shatila, accompanied by my driver, and found the place reasonably calm and orderly. No one rushed me—an obvious Yank in their midst--or cursed me out.

It took a half-day to get there, but Balbec was worth the trouble. Because I’d dropped my camera in a freak accident in my hotel room and smashed the telephoto lens, I have no ocular proof of my visit. We got, for 75 dollars, the truly charming Ummayid/Roman site of Anjar, a wine-tasting stop at Ksara, a a superb but rushed dinner at the “best restaurant in Lebanon” (the “Arabi Casino” perched in the mountains) and the beautiful, fantastically well-preserved ruins of the ancient Roman religious site of Balbec (which means “temple of Baal” the sun god). Featuring the remains of a temple to Jupiter and another to Bacchus, it is a small, very manageable ruin in a particularly scenic spot of the Bekaa Valley. The temple of Bacchus is the single best preserved Roman building I have ever seen (outside Rome’s Panteone) – like a miniature Parthenon. The whole site begs comparison with one other well-preserved Roman site--Ephesus in Turkey, which includes the contours of a whole city.

What I will remember perhaps even longer than the classic architecture of Balbec is the comraderie of the busload of tourists I travelled with to Balbec. Across the aisle from me was a young Pakistani couple from the Emirates – apparent strangers until, noticing the husband’s fluent American accent, I asked him where he went to school. His answer, “Madison, Wisconsin” placed him in a highly select group of only four in my whole experience of the Middle East. Though we probably wouldn’t have been great friends in Madison—the old hippy and the young business grad—we enjoyed the old school connection and present encounter. I also enjoyed the naïve but genuine interest of an Indian doctor (working in Saudi) in the religion of paganism, the real French of two authentic female French tourists, and the affable guide Abbas. I was also amazed to learn that an educated and attractive European pair—the husband of which was wielding a camera in a way I envied for obvious reasons—were retired int the Greek island of Leros. Leros? Let me see. Isn’t that the small lump we see, sitting in Bodrum, Turkey, every day on the horizon just north of Calymnos? A common alma mater, exchanged addresses and hopes for a visit in the future—such are the chancy miracles of travel.

So no major revelations or change of heart on the “road to Damascus” – just a few small insights. One of these was based on the fact that Lebanon draws an interesting bunch of travelers. The more special the country, it seems, the better quality the tourists and vice versa (the less special the country, the more riffraffish the people who come to its shores). And finally this modest observation: the more you travel, the more at home you feel not being at home. And, oh yes, it was both Saul & Paul since the former turned into the latter by converting from paganism to Christianity.

Vive Lebanon!
Vive le Liban libre!

Weaving Strands of the Silk Road

Early on in Shadow of the Silk Road, Colin Thubron gets a key travel epiphany, one of many in the course of his epic eight month 7000 mile journey from Xian, China to Antakya (Antioch) Turkey – the endpoints of that legendary route once traveled by camels, carpets, caravans and silk. The author as is his wont has just been staring intensely at some artifacts: he notices tortoises and dragons mixing with Islamic designs in a Xian mosque:
“…alongside my disquiet, an excitement rises: it is the stir of things transforming, of peoples intermingling and transmuting one another. This I recognize is the merchant’s reality: everything convertible, kaleidoscopic. The purity of cultures, even the Chinese, becomes an illusion. So the hybrid mosque is like a promise or warning. It is the work of the Silk Road, long ago. Nothing ahead of me, I sense, will be homogeneous, constant. To follow a road is to follow diversity: a flow of interlocked voices, arguing, in a cloud of dust.”(31)

With these words, the author has perhaps provided the best description of his own work along with a sample of his writerly wares. Thubron really does exert himself to explain his kaleidoscopic theme wherever he finds himself on the hard road from China to Kyrgyzstan (rough), Uzbekistan (rougher), and Afghanistan (roughest), then on to the relative peace of Iran and Kurdish Turkey. In all of these places, besides the rich description of places and persons, we get insights into the old borderless confusion of the Silk Road which to some extent still supersedes the modern nation states defined by maps but not by any natural borders.

“To follow the Silk Road,” he writes, “is to follow a ghost. It flows through the heart of Asia, but it has officially vanished leaving behind it the pattern of its restlessness: counterfeit borders, unmapped peoples. The road forks and wanders wherever you are. It is not a single way, but many: a web of choices. Mine stretches more than seven thousand miles, and is occasionally dangerous.” (3)

This is pretty much how the whole book goes. Thubron, who is also a novelist, plays the multiple roles of hardcore traveler, multilingual companion, evocative historian and indefatigable ghost-chaser. Everywhere he goes he decodes both faces and places according to these transmuting insights and finds plenty of evidence for his assumptions.

In China, he has a particularly good time dismantling fixed Chinese notions of their nation’s “pure” identity. He sees the Yellow Emperor, for example, whom Chinese regard as the founder of their nation and culture as most likely the descendent of northern Mongol tribes (though he presents no proof for this assertion). He also finds traces of the old Nestorian Christian cult in the famous caves of Dunhuang (94), and, in the pale faces of a remote Gansu village, descendents it is thought, of a lost Roman legion (75).

In Xinjiang (China’s westernmost province), his reflections on the “most hybrid people of all,” (115) the Uighur, lead him to envision the deepest effects of the Silk Road as a “river where nations lost their meaning. This after all was the road whose Chinese silk lay in the graves of Iron Age Germany. It had spread variousness and impurity.”

After cataloguing the many cross cultural oddities he’s picked up over the years (for example, Chinese opera sleeves coming from Crete), Thubron’s imagination goes into overdrive: “…you could go mad… tracing the origins of the simplest things. The peppers in my pilau would return to India, I fancied, the sesame on my bread to central Asia. I pictured the onions flying westward off my neighbor’s plate, while his pistachio nuts disappeared to Persia. China, of course, would claim the paper napkins and rose wilting on the counter…” 116

Thubron cites few sources for all these theories but one never doubts that his research is painstaking and accurate. He’s also good on his basic themes the route itself and its prime mover silk -- its history, biology and production. He describes with pleasure the intricate process by which a long series of middlemen exchanged goods so that, at one moment, ancient Romans and Chinese might be wearing each other’s goods or designs, without ever having met in the flesh. He even braves going into modern silk shops to check out the wares. (116)

Thubron the intellectual tries hard to get inside the spirit of Silk Road commerce by a series of imaginary dialogues between himself and a “Sogdian trader” who questions the author’s purpose in traveling and mocks his lack of trading skills, among other things.

Not only silk and spices but war and warfare also traveled the Silk Road, resulting in several spectacular destructions of Middle Eastern capitals and civilizations, the most notorious having been carried out by the Mongol emperor, Genghis Khan, who destroyed Baghdad, Samarkand and Bukhara among other legends. Thubron dutifully visits their mausoleums and ruins (he seems particularly fond of ancient graveyards that locals have forgotten) providing a useful background for those whose history courses didn’t include this region (probably most of my fellow Americans).

The author is also interested in the religions (“shapes of faith”) of the Silk Road, a subject in which he shows unusual knowledge and sensitivity. His accounts of the Tibetan “Living Buddha” in Lanzhou (“tamed” by the Chinese authorities) and modern, decadent Taoists are probing and sceptical; he produces a more involved portrait of a Russian Orthodox service in Samarkand in which he seems to join in. But Thubron’s most impressive piece of religious tourism occurs in northeast Iran (Herat) where, in spite of his misgivings about Shiism, he surreptitiously participates in one of that religion’s most sacred rituals.

Though Thubron may be one of the most intellectual and culturally astute of travelers, he is also a physical traveler who takes on a lot of tough terrain, bad weather and other assorted risks (including the SARS epidemic) in this journey. He’s physically fit, one senses, and a hard worker, scaling numerous mountain top fortresses in Iran; he makes it to the top of the Assassins mountain where he’s thrilled to find evidence of Mongol destruction. He rides horses in Kyrgyzstan, outfaces a would-be bandit and is nearly killed in a head-on car collision in the same country. There are also increasing threats of violence in and around Afghanistan which at that time was under attack by US forces retaliating for 9/11, forcing Thubron to reschedule that part of his trip a year later. The Afghanistan he describes, however, is still far from safe, and he goes through it in a rush of panicky moves. The most brutal episode though is the extraction of one of the author’s teeth without painkillers, in a dental clinic in Iran, an account sure to go down as one of the most horrendous in the history of travel.

If all of this seems a bit heavy for the supposed entertainment requirements of the travel genre, let me say that, yes, there are times when I wish Thubron would take a day off, and forget about those piles of rocks that seem to fascinate him. Because when he does relax, the results are nearly always engaging and revealing.

For the human element, Thubron doesn’t seek out the high and mighty for interviews, but sticks to the ruck of common humanity. His encounters in this book are no less varied than one would expect from Behind the Wall and The Lost Heart of Asia, and you only wish there were more of them. Speaking adequate Chinese and fluent Russian (and perhaps Arabic since he reads it), he is able to get under the skin of his interlocutors and bring out their individuality. Since this isn’t Thubron’s first passage through these regions, he has friends from previous trips whose perspectives and changes in fortune add a lot to the tale.

Thubron views all the people he meets as individuals but certain themes emerge depending on the nationality. His Chinese contacts are mostly defined in relation to the vast economic transformation that has turned so many of them all into frantic entrepreneurs, but he also notes ghostly vestiges of the Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen Square, and clearly sympathizes with and draws out the anti-Chinese sentiment of minority people (mainly Uighurs) who are perhaps the most memorable voices of this section of the book.

Among the mountain tribes of the various “istan” republics, Thubron finds tough, simple, warm-hearted people whose hardscrabble existence he shares and admires. Independence (from the USSR) came to most of the “Istans” without a struggle; the younger generation no longer remembers Communism. The post-soviet euphoria has of course dried up, and some of Thubron’s contacts long for the orderly soviet times when people at least had work. Neither Islam nor nationalism seems strongly implanted among these people many of whom have reverted to subsistence pastoralism. You feel that Thubron nonetheless thoroughly enjoys himself among these nouveaux rustics, especially the horseback riding Kyrgyzis where he rides a “docile roan.”

In super legendary Samarkand and Bukhara (whether in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan or Kazakhstan the author’ map doesn’t make clear), his fervent attention to the tomb of Tamerlane dominates the tale, but an irreverent encounter with subjects depicted in a previous book, artist-intellectual types who still cling to secularism and Stalin, is one of the best parts of the book. It’s too bad he doesn’t tell us more about what life is like under the last Soviet-style dictator, Karimov.

The interesting encounters never stop, but as the book goes on you feel Thubron’s increasing obsession with solving his multicultural puzzles.

That doesn’t prevent the final chapters of his book, “Over the Oxus” and “Mourning” from being among the most gripping and best-written sections of the book; Afghanistan’s real dangers are obvious as Thubron slips through a messy situation, barely making it out of the danger zone, but he does, landing in the relative safety of Herat and Meshed, which he has visited before and is anxious to see again. You almost expect a conversion as Thubron literally gets carried away on a sea of living worshippers at the Festival of Ali celebrated at a legendary mosque in Meshed. Only the last detail tells you, he has retained his skepticism: the mosque, he writes, looks like a ship “setting sail into the dark.”

And that brings up the subject of Thubron’s style. As the reader may have guessed already from the brief samples quoted, it is not just that Thubron writes well; it is that he transmutes metaphorically nearly everything he sees, as in (China): “Beneath us, the river was liquid loam, the colour of milk chocolate, roiling between cliffs split by rain into bitter gullies. Over this drama the dark descended suddenly, and our train became a snake glimmering through emptiness” (though you wonder how he managed to see his own train (on horseback): “We went through an icy stillness. The shadows of powder-puff clouds marbled the water, which lisped alongside in nervous waves. A faint wind tapped in my ears. Yet by noon the snow was thawing, the horse’s hoof’ sinking into slush…” And “As the hills lurched into mountains, their flanks burned with mauve strata or a dull, charred black, and dribbled purple scree.” (154-55). There is also a falling rhythm in Thubron’s descriptive passages that end on a blank, empty or dark note, as in the last sentence of the book: “…the sky was not the blue calm of my imagined homecoming, but a troubled cloudscape that swept the sea in moving gleams and shadows.” In view of the superb writing found here, it’s not surprising that Colin Thubron is also a distinguished novelist.

Finally, Shadow of the Silk Road is one more celebration of travel. No one has described better the peculiar joys of this activity. Here he is in Labrang, not far from Tibet:
“My feet crunch over the snow, seeming light and lonely, and from somewhere in the darkness ahead,-- like an old god clearing his throat – sounds the braying of a horn. Then a familiar elation wells up…The experience is inseparable from solitude and a vestigial fear, because you don’t know where the road will end, who will be there.”
(originally published in Bloomsbury Review, US, reprinted three times)