Exploring Tyre Old Town
Given the chap with the moustache has offered intensive, and, further, only discreetly amused assistance in my parking fiasco, I feel we should eat in...
Monthly Archive: June 2012
A Dignified Entrance to the Historic City of Tyre
“Where does the motorway end?” I say, for the third time. I mean, clearly the motorway HAS ended. I’ve just driven through a checkpoint manned...
On the Trail of the Phoenicians – Sidon
One of many things that makes the Middle East worthwhile is the sense that you’re walking in history, amid names and places that are embedded...
The Friday Photo: Silk and Silk Moths
This is a piece of eighteenth century ecclesiastical silk from Italy. And below are the bizarre creatures that produced it: silk moths, at the end...
HezbollahLand: The Middle East Writ Large
We wind our way up, and up, and up, along a narrow road through stark and beautiful moutains in the hinterlands of South Lebanon, within...
Big Dreams, Big Guns and Bad Taxidermy
For sheer insanity and awe-inspiring self-belief, Moussa Castle has to rank pretty high in the fields of all human endeavour. It’s like a peculiarly Lebanese...
The Village Where Time Just Stopped
Up in the Chouf, the mountains that are home to Lebanon’s biggest nature reserve, a whirl of cedars, cypresses, golden broom and wildflowers, we make...
Friday Photo Essay: Flowers in Ancient Byblos
I fell a little bit in love with Byblos Old Town. But the ruins of the ancient city — some of them dating back six...