There are flowers in the ruins, flowers on the razorwire, flowers in the souks…

And they’re just plain old-fashioned gorgeous.

To be honest, these photos look a bit tired now I’ve seen what I can do with my lovely new lenses. I’m finally upgrading from the kit lens on my camera, and I’ve been photography shopping! I’ll tell you more next week.

The post Friday Photo Essay: Lebanon Flowers appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

Sure, I love Dahab. And as a quiet, beautiful, cost-effective place in which to work with minimal distraction, it would be my top pick in the Middle East.

That doesn’t mean I was happy about it.

Because, even before the recent flawlessly-timed coup, I was more than aware of the risks of Egypt’s, umm, vibrant political scene going, as we say in Britain, tits-up.

My mother had suggested Madaba in Jordan, but, at the risk of committing blogger blasphemy, Jordan lacks the insanity of Egypt and the sophistication – yeah, insanity too – of Lebanon.

Y’know. It’s a nice country, and all, but, outside of Petra, it’s rather short on charisma, and the notion of paying Western European prices to stay somewhere so fundamentally provincial . . .

Well, Dahab it was.

Further, after spending eight hours of my last day in Beirut waiting for a camera lens which didn’t show, experiencing the worst Old-Fashioned of my life as my farewell drink in Beirut, and then signally failing to go to sleep early, I was….

Well, in an unusually bad mood for a 3.30am wakeup. Which is, for the record, rather earlier than I’d been going to bed in Beirut.

Plus, after a week or so slutting around wearing what I liked, I wasn’t best pleased at having to don my long-sleeved loose cardi and my scarf, either. I packed both into my carry-on with a feeling of intense distaste.

Cairo airport didn’t improve my mood. In fact, if you find anyone whose mood has ever been improved by Cairo airport, I recommend you get their medication checked.

Not least because there was a large part of me which could quite happily have spent a week longer in Beirut, hanging with cherubs, drinking cocktails and perhaps making it out to the ruins at Baalbek, while generally behaving like a one-woman Club 18-30 holiday.

Whereas instead I was being a responsible adult and heading into a shitstorm of deadlines and creative projects.

Although, unlike Beirut, Cairo does at least have smoking sections.

I eyed the surging, panicking queues at the transit point with an expression of deep distaste.

They were being managed in a very Egyptian fashion.

Which is to say there was one overwhelmed man whose job it was to fail to answer questions, and three guys standing near him, whose job was to point you to him.

By the time I had bought my visa, my mood would be best described as baleful. I hate airports at the best of times, and, after averaging under four hours sleep a night for the last few days, this was not the best of times.

At Sharm, my baggage failing to appear, I endeavoured to leave the building for a cigarette.

“No bags?” says the guy on the door.

“I’m waiting for my bags,” I say.

“No bags, no leave, no come back in,” he says.

WHAT?! Seriously, WTF?! This is Egypt?! One of the nice things about Egypt is you can smoke absolutely bloody anywhere, pretty much.

“OK,” I say. “I want to smoke. Where can I smoke?”

Now, on arrival in Beirut, I’d met a nice Iraqi who had taken me to an illegal smoking place well known to all frequent flyers through Beirut. “No smoking,” he says.

The only fucking smoke-free airport in Egypt, and they have lost my bag and are refusing to allow me to leave without it.

Fucking Egypt, I think. I KNEW I should have stayed in Lebanon.

Half an hour after landing, there are five of us standing hopefully by the carousel, which trundles round and round, entirely empty. “I think they’ve lost our bags,” I say to a British guy.

“I hope not,” he says.

“Well, they haven’t come through, have they?” I say.

I go and ask my enemy at the door. There are, in fact, three chaps standing at the door. None of them, of course, can assist.

“Wait,” says my enemy.

Nicotine withdrawal courses through my system. I bite back a response along the lines of, “I HAVE BEEN WAITING. That’s how I know they’re lost.”

Time passes. The carousel continues to roll, empty, with five international fliers standing forlornly by it.

I endeavour to find somewhere or someone to storm off to to make a scene to or at.

Nada, nix.

There is an assistance desk, which is unmanned, but has a phone by it. I pick up the phone and explain that our bags are lost.

“Five minutes,” says a disembodied voice at the other end.

Time passes. Yet again.

I chat desultorily to the British guy.

Sharm domestic arrivals is not a place where one would choose to spend any time. It’s a bloody great barn of a place with some overpriced money-changers, a carousel, a desk selling hotels, another desk touting Mercedes taxis, and, frankly, not that much else.

“I think the bags are here,” says an Egyptian guy.

“WHERE?” I say.

He points through a glass door, to another empty arrivals hall, another barn of a place, with a carousel trundling round and round and six guys standing there doing absolutely nothing.

“Great!” I say.

I think I can see my battered Thai fake backpack travelling round the carousel.

I pick up the phone. “Could you open the door, please?”

The Egyptian asks in Arabic whether they could open the door.

In a dumb show like something last seen on Covent Garden piazza, the guy mimes that he does not have the key. Nor do any of his other six friends have the key.

Then they disappear. All seven of them. Presumably to look for a key. All seven of them, looking for one key, in one place.

GREAT.

“Five minutes,” says the Egyptian guy.

Now, I hate flying at the best of times. It’s environmentally destructive and it involves too much time in airports, but, although Middle Eastern citizens can still take buses through Syria, Syria’s a no-go for Westerners at this time, so I’m stuck with the sodding flight.

“That’s an Egyptian five minutes, right?” I say.

He looks a little offended.

I mentally brace myself for the next step in the Egyptian airport sequence, the one I call “fighting with a baying mob of taxi drivers while holding on to my bag for dear life”, and wonder whether we’ve been here long enough that my Egyptian travel blogger friend, who offered me a lift provided it was after noon, will actually be awake.

I said not to bother, because the flight got in at 9, but it’s 10.30 now, and my backpack is on the other side of a locked door.

It’s not an Egyptian five minutes, in fact. It’s an Indonesian five minutes, read, about twenty-five minutes, before me and my pack are reunited.

Fucking Egypt, I think.

Fucking, fucking Egypt.

Egypt, dear reader, is like China. One alternates between awed wonder, utter befuddlement, a brief, elusory sense that one understands the place and the people, that one “gets” Egypt, a weird, conflicted affection, and utter, utter rage. And yet one keeps coming back.

Well, like China but with added sexual harassment.

Stepping out of the airport is like opening an oven door: a blast of dry, dry desert heat, with added sand.

My guidebook says the fare to the bus station should be about 30 Egyptian pounds. According to the sign, it is 120 Egyptian pounds. Fuck that for a game of soldiers, I think.

In Egypt, lest you think I’m being irrational, one can hire an entire taxi with a driver for an entire day for 150 Egyptian pounds.

I am NOT paying 80% of that for a 10k ride to the bus stop, but unfortunately I’ve neglected to find a buddy to split the cab, and, also, I am too tired, too old, too lazy, and, let’s face it, insufficiently poor to walk out of the airport to the main road and flag a service taxi or a minibus.

The taxi drivers rush at me like something out of 28 Days Later, howling. Here we go, I think.

“How much to the bus station?” I ask the fastest runner.

“No problem!” he says, grabbing at my bag. This is taxi driver speak for “Don’t worry, pretty, stupid lady, I will extort you later.”

“No,” I say, pulling my bag back from him. “HOW MUCH?”

Then, as the tug of war continues, I unleash my rubbish Arabic, which at least demonstrates I’ve been to Egypt before. “HOW MANY? BUS STATION, HOW MANY?”

“120,” he says. “Dahab, 250. No buses.”

Bugger. He’s gone with the fare on the sign, leaving me no room to manoeuvre. I pause.

Then, in a stroke of genius, “Servees!” I say, meaning he can pick up others.

“No servees,” he says.

“My friend,” I say. “In Luxor, in Cairo, in any city in Egypt I can hire a taxi for one full day for 150 Egyptian. I cannot pay 120 to go to the bus station.”

“That book is old,” he says, pointing at my guidebook. “The bus station has moved.”

“I’m sure it has,” I say. “But the bus station hasn’t moved 100 kilometres from the airport, has it?”

“120,” he says.

“No,” I say.

Another guy comes up from the back. “OK,” he says. “What’s your best price?”

“70,” I say.

This is two to three times a reasonable tourist fare for the journey, so, obviously, he’s good with that.

“Come!” he says.

The others rush at him, yelling and baying. It almost gets physical.

He shrugs at me, “Sorry.”

I am now in such a bad temper that the remaining 50 Egyptian pounds, money I would and do routinely drop on a latte, has become a point of principal.

I storm over to a cab that’s about to pull out “Bus stop, servees!” I say, in Arabic. He opens his door. The others rush at him, baying and yelling.

He shrugs. Sorry.

As always when fighting with taxi drivers in Egypt, the scene operates on a range of levels.

There is that Mediterranean love of operatic drama, that very Egyptian pride in cunningly outsmarting the stupid, female tourist, but also, at some level, a genuine desperation: this is a poor country, the economy is tanking, and tourist numbers are a fraction of what they were.

Anywise, I have pulled myself into the right by going for a service taxi, so I am cheating.

We to and fro. “Come,” says one guy, with steroid muscles and a steroid attitude. “You are beautiful lady. I will take you!”

“How much?” I say.

“No problem,” he says, grabbing my arm, which enrages me. Then he adds some Arabic obscenities in a conversational tone. Great.

In traditional Egyptian culture, a man should not touch a woman who is not a family member ANYWHERE on her body, so grabbing someone’s upper arm is like touching her arse in other parts of the world.

Further, frankly, I’ve had enough Egyptian men address Arabic obscenities to me to recognise some of the vocabulary, if not, mercifully, the fine detail.

“No,” I say. “70, I go with you.”

He starts to yell at me. And then he tells me I am beautiful. And then he yells at me again. And then he gives me some more Arabic filth in a conversational tone.

My first driver is looking more appealing by the second. I wonder, fleetingly, if they’re working as a tag team, but I think Muscles genuinely believes a) that he’s Adonis and b) that he’s the first guy ever to have sworn at me in Arabic.

“Listen, my friend,” I say, reopening negotiations with the original guy. “I have a friend in Sharm and within half an hour he will be awake, and he can collect me.”

“He’s not here,” says my taxi driver. 15-love.

“Or, I can walk to the main road and take a micro,” I say, referring to the minibuses that trundle all major routes in Egypt and will pick you up for a few Egyptian pounds. 15-all.

“No micro,” he says. This is bullshit, and we both know it, on the other hand, I do actually want to get to Dahab and find a house rental, optimally one I can move straight into today and get on with some work, and, clearly, if I wanted a micro I’d be walking already. 30-15.

I put on my pack and make as though I’m walking to the road. 30-all.

“OK,” he says. “I make you special price! 100.” 40-30

“80,” I say. Deuce.

“90,” he says. Advantage him.

“OK,” I say. GAME!

Honour, on both sides, is satisfied, and we embark for a perfectly amicable fifteen minute ride to the bus station.

Where there are, indeed, no buses until 3pm, but I find a Bedouin driver who’s going that way anyway and will take me with his other fare – service! – for 100 Egyptian.

It is 1pm when we reach Dahab, and I’ve been up for 11 hours on three hours sleep, my eyes are conjunctivitis pink, and I have an ugly nicotine and caffeine twitch.

A tout accosts me in the street, so I get him looking for houses for me, then figure I’ll base myself at Penguin, the nice, friendly guesthouse where we stayed before and where they won’t mind me dumping my stuff and using their internet to look for a house stay and where — insha’allah — someone probably knows of a few houses going anyway.

“Hello!” says one of the guys, doing a double-take. “Welcome back! Where’s Z?”

And at that moment, as I begin to explain our crazy global life, how Z is currently in France with his Australian dad, but will be flying in all on his own to join me in a couple of weeks, I know that Dahab is going to be, well, fine.

I sit down on the low cushions, shove a passing cat out of the way, look out over the sea to the sand haze over the rosy mountains of Saudi Arabia in the distance and think, “Well! Hello Dahab! It IS good to be back.”

I polish my metaphorical halo. THERE! I could have stayed in Beirut, acting like a one-woman Benidorm hen night until it got old. And now I’m in Dahab.

I’m going to do ALL my writing jobs and I’m TOTALLY going to nail this writing project, not to mention completing my website redesign! No problem!

The post Egypt?! What Was I THINKING?! appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

I arrive at the bar in a state of high dudgeon, not to say mid-argument with the taxi driver, who has just offered me $200 for sex (which, yes, I find offensive, although, I guess, at least it wasn’t $20) and then tripled our pre-agreed cab fare when I say no.

“NO!” I say (recalling an exchange my father had along these lines with an Athenian taxi driver when I can’t have been older than Z is now, minus the preceding proposition, of course). “YOU give me the 5000 change now. After YOU give ME the 5000, I give YOU this 10,000.”

He hands it over rather sulkily and honour (or lack of it) is satisfied. I figure my skinny jeans must be tighter than they feel.

Or, of course, it could be the old single mother = prostitute issue playing out. We are, after all, in the Middle East.

“Ooh! Hello!” I say. It’s that doorman I last saw at the gay night. “Do you know that man just offered me $200 for sex and then tried to charge me $10 from downtown?!”

He shrugs and sniggers. “Welcome to Beirut!” he says.

This is a good bar, but not primarily a cocktail bar, I’m here for fun after my work stuff, though if I can read my handwriting, I’ll probably write it up.

“Negroni, please,” I say to the bartender. “No soda! I’m not having a good evening.”

And then I inflict my cab driver story on him, too.

I’m dancing with a group of hipsters when one of them, the gay one, starts buying rounds of shooters. Beirutis love their shooters, in particular one called the dou dou, which is vodka, tabasco and lemon with an olive in it.

He’s a club promoter. He’s affecting keen interest in my cab driver story.

And I’ve decided he’s gay.

No matter how many times he tells me he’s not gay, I say, “You must be! That’s a gay moustache. That’s a TOTALLY gay moustache!”

It’s not, actually, I’ve now figured out that it is, in fact, a hipster moustache, but to anyone my generation it speaks of back-pocket handkerchief codes (side note: Elton John’s husband has, allegedly, been known to go out with a starred handkerchief in his back pocket. Oh, work it out!) and Earl’s Court Road and leather jackets.

Still, in my brain, he’s not someone I’m going to sleep with, he’s my new gay friend.

He is, like most people in the bar, younger than me — but hey! I’m wearing makeup! And it’s dark! — plus everyone in here’s so utterly lathered I even feel comfortable dancing.

We’re in conversation about how similar Beirut and Tel Aviv are – he has friends from Tel Aviv, but as the two countries are still technically at war, they can only hang out in Ibiza – when this cherub walks into the bar.

Great! He knows my gay friend! Wicked!

He’s also hot, drunk and clearly not too picky!

All three criteria met. Thanking you!

Time washes away in a flood of gin and tonics and dou dou shooters and I find myself sucking face at the bar, with the cherub, who turns out to be 26.

Yeah, I know.

CLASSY, right?

“Everyone in Beirut hates you,” I say.

“Yeah,” the cherub says. “I know.”

“Seriously, you spend more than 15 minutes talking to anyone and they’re bitching about the generators,” I say. “If I were you, I’d lie about your job.”

One of many, many bizarre things about Lebanon is its infrastructure. Hezbollah runs the infrastructure in its bits of the country, so much so that when the government tried to insist they moved over to the same phonelines as everyone else they invaded Beirut and blew some stuff up.

In the rest of the country, there are a limited numbers of generators, so most businesses have their own generators to cope with when the electricity goes out, which it does most evenings with tiresome frequency.

This is because, as others have explained to me, and the cherub will explain to me, “Yeah, if we got more generators prices would go down and it would be like a normal job. I’d be earning $1000 a month! I spend that on my cellphone!”

“You need a new contract,” I say. “That’s just stupid.”

“What?” he says.

“Spending a thousand bucks a month on your cellphone. That’s stupid.”

Though, if Lebanese telecoms work the same way as Lebanese power infrastructure, I guess he doesn’t have much choice.

“No,” my new gay friend is explaining to me for, perhaps, the fifteenth time, demonstrating reserves of patience that with sober hindsight beggar belief. “I’m not gay. In fact, I’m very attracted to you, and until he came along, I was hoping that we could get together.”

“Oh,” I say. “Sorry ’bout that. You’re not friends, are you?!”

“We were at school together,” he says. “I hadn’t seen him for years until he walked in here.”

“Oh,” I say.

The cherub has also explained this to me but – and until I got to Egypt I’d always assumed that Middle Easterners couldn’t hold their drink, whereas at least the ones I’ve tried to match make Russians look like a bunch of pussies – what with an evening’s bar reviewing under my belt and now keeping up with the shooter rounds, my grasp on events is kinda fuzzy.

Every time, in fact, I’ve found myself drinking with Middle Eastern men I’ve been comprehensively outdrunk.

Which, as someone who’s been reviewing bars on and off for pretty much two decades, is not, actually, all that usual.

I could always STOP drinking, of course. But I’m enjoying myself.

And what’s the worst thing that could happen?

Oh yeah, going home with a cherub!

And, given I am child-free, at leisure and actively not looking for a life partner, that’s not a bad thing at all.

“Why are you wearing your seatbelt?” the cherub asks, heading into a particularly savage turn at speed.

We are on the way back from his pick of hotel, because he has the national infrastructure to fuck up this morning and his dad (I’m guessing it’s his dad, though possibly it’s his uncle or his brother) will kill him if he’s late.

A myriad answers race through my head, in roughly this order…

Because you’re Lebanese. You’re male. You’re 26. You’re drunk. You’ve been up all night. And, even by Lebanese standards, your driving style is absolutely fucking terrifying.

“Look!” he says, laughing. “No hands!”

“Yeah,” I say, tensing on reflex then forcibly relaxing, because if you’re going to hit something, especially at this speed, you want to go in floppy. “The thing is, I was in a car crash a month or so ago. I still have the holes in my head, and I do have a child, so when you… Jesus!”

He’s going for the overtake. With no hands.

My hands go towards my face on reflex, but I restrain the movement for fear of encouraging him further.

“How are you going to cope at work?” I ask weakly.

“Oh,” he says blithely. “I’ll probably do some coke.”

I am afflicted by nostalgia for those halcyon days when I had the energy and dynamism of youth and drugs and I were friends (as I explained à propos of a séance, drugs and I are through).

“Call me when I finish work,” he says. “12 hours from now.”

I don’t. I need to be up before 4am to make my flight to Dahab, where I intend to get a house, stay out of mischief, do some work and generally prepare for the return of my beloved spawn.

Further, while the younger me would have partied straight through and got on the plane still buzzing, I’m a responsible adult now. Allegedly.

The post Yep, Definitely Time To Leave This Town appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

In Z’s absence, relieved from the responsibilities of parenting and focused on bar reviewing, I find myself regressing rapidly.

At the beginning of the evening, scars firmly covered, with five-inch wedges and skinny jeans applied to – well, fundamentally, distract attention from my face – I’ve lost about five years.

By midnight, when I drag myself out of a bar that I’m soooo not going to review but want to jump around in anyway, I’ve lost another ten, although as I settle down in a lovely little sushi bar for tuna and salmon sashimi and a glass of Lebanese rosé, I feel quite grownup.

Note-taking is over for the night. “I should go home now,” I think to myself, strolling down Gemmayze Street which is chock-full of young, beautiful people having a bunch of fun. Then “F*ck it! It’s Saturday night! Beirut is a f*cking great city! Letsh go and have jusht one more drink.”

I head to a little hole in the wall bar for which I’ve developed an intense fondness, despite the fact that it’s routinely so rammed you can barely move let alone sit down, figuring that I’ll enjoy a good Negroni – cocktails are always more fun when you’re drinking them for pleasure alone – then piss off back to my hotel some time before slut o’clock.

Now, it’s no great secret that I’m absolutely crap with boys. Always have been. Always will be.

My two best female friends in London did try and explain the art of pulling to me. Even train me in it, in fact.

There we’d be, dolled up in our finest PVC micros and klubwear with a K, stumbling around yet another Soho afterhours joint or 4am-start nightclub in heels not one of us could walk in, our pupils the size of flying saucers.

“So, what you need to do is this,” X would say. “When you walk in, take a good look around, walk the room and see who’s checking you out, and who likes the look of you. Then just dance close to them. See! Easy!”

But I don’t have X’s pneumatic breasts. Or, for that matter, her sense of rhythm.

“There!” she’d say. “Look! He likes you. You’re TOTALLY in there.”

“WHO?” I’d say. “Who?! What? Where? Wanna do another pill?”

“Oh for f*ck’s sake,” she’d say. “The guy on the stairs! Now, pretend you’re going to the loo, and walk past him… Oh, yeah, OK, maybe a quarter…”

Y also had (still has) limited sensitivity to nuance, which meant she typically ended up with the type of guys that drag you out of the club by your hair.

But she’s absolutely drop-dead gorgeous with a figure that’s close to Barbie doll and a face that makes even one’s parents comment on the holiday snaps, “Now, isn’t Y a beautiful girl…?”

Which isn’t to say that I always went home solo in those bygone days. But, basically, I’ve never had a sensitivity to nuance, or either X’s or Y’s strike rate…

Incidentally, chicks, if you’re in your teens or 20s, dressed up fabulous for a nightclub, get the pictures. And keep them.

Because in decades to come, you’ll look back at them in mild awe and pleasure at how very, very young and pretty you once were, and further at how you had ABSOLUTELY no bloody idea of this, or that it would ever end…

Also get pictures of yourself looking young and pretty in your 30s, your 40s, your 50s and your 60s, because given you may well live to 90, every single age will look young and pretty with the benefit of hindsight.

“Are you together?” asks the guy on the door.

“No,” I say, on reflex.

“Yes,” the bloke next to me says, simultaneously.

My mental sequence goes roughly like this. “Ooh! He’s hitting on me! Oh my god, he’s hot. Oh Jesus Christ, he can’t be more than 25. He CAN’T be! Oh, wait a moment, it’s dark in here and I’m wearing makeup, maybe he IS hitting on me…”

“This is really crowded,” he says. “You wanna go somewhere else?”

This is sufficiently lacking in subtlety even for me to confirm that I’m, well, in there.

So, OK.

Maybe he’s 28? Maybe even 30?

“Yeah,” I say. “The bar next door does good drinks and it’s not too busy.”

We go next door, where the lighting is rather brighter, unfortunately, than the lighting in the bar I like, and I rapidly readjust my hair to cover my scars. Aaarrrggghhhh….

He doesn’t seem bothered. I figure he’s drunk.

Hot, drunk and clearly not too picky. EXCELLENT!

Like a good feminist, I wave fifty dollar bills at him when the bill comes, but I’m also – BAD FEMINIST! – kinda chuffed that he is having absolutely none of that.

By the time we’ve got up to the Pigeon Rocks, a pair of frankly not that whelming pinnacles of which Beirutis are mystifyingly proud, I’ve reverted to about 18, except for a mental calculation in my head that keeps going, “Left Beirut aged 17. Last here 8 years ago. 8 +17 = 25. 38-25 = 13. 25-11 = 14. So, just marginally closer in age to me than to my son, and anyway it’s not sex tourism if you meet them in a bar and they’re paying, right?”

By about 3am, after some time tooling around Beirut in his X-5, I’m approximately 15.

Or, as he says, it’s like being in high school.

Which can’t have been that long ago for him, but was over two decades ago for me. Jesus.

I make it into my hotel, which has a firm “no guests” policy – despite the sexual freedom of sectors of Beirut nightlife, both male and female, Lebanon is fundamentally more conservative that it might at first appear, and anyway I don’t want some chap in my space right now, thank you very much – around 5am, feeling refreshed, not to say rejuvenated.

My UK number doesn’t work here and, although I’ll quite happily drop 50 bucks on frivolities such as food, drink and clothes, I’m too tight to pay 50 bucks for a Lebanese SIM card, so I give him email and Skype instead.

Anywise, he emails that evening. I call him. We chat and he says, “Call me in an hour.”

I get dressed and do so.

It rings out.

B*gger. WTF?

I borrow a mobile from a nice chap of my sort of age who’s staying in my hotel and ping him a text with my approximate movements for the evening: going to eat at X bar, after that will be in Y bar, and head on out to dine on a salad of foie gras and green haricots with an extremely palatable basil, cucumber and gin cocktail.

If he shows, he shows.

If not, more fish in the sea.

Beirut, I conclude, as I savour my enormous slab of foie gras and wonder whether the foie gras mayo is a bridge too far and they should really just have stuck with the surprisingly plangent dressing on the haricots (answer: YES, you’re in Beirut), is really rather fun.

Beirut, let it hereby be written, is also absolutely bloody dead on a Sunday night, especially in summer where a lot of the action that’s not on the rooftops is up the coast in Byblos or Jounieh, and perhaps also impacted by the ongoing action of a different sort in Tripoli.

In big cities, nights like Sundays, Wednesdays and Thursdays are good nights for bar reviewing, and fun in general, because the cool kids are out and about and the bridge and tunnel aren’t, and you can actually get up to the bar to order your test cocktail without wading through a heaving crowd of…

… Well, I was going to say chicks in orange foundation, but as, since the scarring, I’ve been on the orange side myself at night – it’s hard to match foundations to Caucasian skin in Asia – people in glass houses…

But Beirut isn’t a big city. Like Tel Aviv, it’s cosmopolitan with a buzzing bar scene, but in population terms, it’s tiny.

So the stretch between Gemmayze and Downtown is like a ghost town.

I wouldn’t say I feel unsafe walking this strip solo in a skirt and high heels in the middle of the night, but I think a more timid soul might do, what with the cars slowing down and all (pace this rather excellent blog post, solo female travel is different from solo chap travel in this respect), and I’m quite pleased to see security guards about.

And the bar I’m headed to, one of the runners for best cocktail bars in Beirut, is also absolutely bloody dead.

Which doesn’t matter, because a) the Negronis are really good b) the bartender’s nice and c) the bloke shows up, having driven from a town down the coast at Lebanese speed, fronts up for a nice hotel and appears not to give a monkey’s about either my advanced age or my scars.

RESULT!

One thing about the ageing process? Your recovery time is slower. (For a more, ahem, grown-up perspective on this, read this from the excellent Wandering Not Lost.)

In my teens and early 20s, I routinely dated guys who were 10 to 15 years older than me, and I always wondered why they were so unenergetic.

Back in the day, I could party until the afternoon, grab what we used to call a “disco nap” for a couple of hours, inspect any of what we used to call “unidentified disco wounds”, eat something, start drinking, then head out and do it all over again.

Gentle reader – no more.

And, kids! Don’t try this at home!

I always thought I looked rough when waking from a disco nap. But it is only now that I begin to understand the meaning of “haggard”.

Because, here’s the thing, when your age is closer to a 4 than a 3 and you’re trying to keep up with someone a decade or more younger, if you don’t get enough sleep, your face collapses. The lines get deeper. The pores open into bloody great craters. And anything that sags, sags further.

And, oh Jesus God! Eye makeup!

Huge, dark panda swirls of defunct eyeliner and mascara can actually look kinda hot – read, really hot! — in the mornings when you’re fresh with the dewy gleam of youth.

At my age? You’re redefining “raddled”. And, the contrast to the dewy youth beside you is really quite unsettling when you currently look, as a lady tabloid picture editor once phrased it, rough as a badger’s arse.

Chaps! It’s not just the beer goggles (though they may, of course, be a factor). It is perfectly possible for a lady — and I use that term loosely — of my age to pass for close to a decade younger, when made up, well rested and, optimally, dimly lit.

On an hour and a half’s sleep, following on from four hours’ sleep, in daylight with a gin hangover and smeared makeup? She may, quite easily, look at least a decade older.

Which is why, dear boys, they call it “beauty sleep”.

Things are left vague, by which, having seen the state of me, I’m not in the least surprised.

Anyway, I’m not sure whether I’m going to stay in Beirut until Wednesday or Saturday, because that depends on whether I can get my camera fixed and buy a new lens for it here.

If I can’t I’ll need go to to Cairo, and Cairo appears to be going through one of its periodic spasms of crazy violent stuff, so I’d really rather get it fixed in Beirut then fly straight into Sharm and get settled in Dahab, writing, but if I can’t get it fixed, I need to be in Cairo and dropping off the camera before the Islamic weekend starts.

This is not something that’s particularly easy to explain to someone who leads a fairly normal life and is not in the slightest location independent.

Further, all I really want to do right now is get a decent night’s sleep and do some of this bloody work I’m supposed to be doing while I’m here.

For Beirut, dear reader, during the summer rooftop party season, is not a good place in which to get some quiet work done.

I go to bed round teatime and sleep through till 9am.

When I wake, I look ten to fifteen years younger than I did when I went to bed, and – yay! – find a camera store which means – drum roll! – I don’t have to go to sodding Cairo, and proceed to book flights to Sharm.

I ping the bloke a text saying thanks for the fun and that I’m around till Saturday, but I’m not particularly expecting to hear from him, so I toddle out bar reviewing perfectly happily.

You know those mornings where just everything seems to go wrong? Deals fall through. A website mysteriously goes down. The internet breaks down. Skype stops working.

And then the ticket company through which I’d thought I’d bought my plane ticket charges my card not once but TWICE while simultaneously cancelling the booking and is only contactable by a number so phenomenally expensive (£1.53 per MINUTE from within the UK) that it’s not actually possible to dial out from Lebanon? (It was eDreams. Avoid. Even if the prices do look cheaper than the actual airline’s fare.)

Anywise, I’m having one of those mornings.

So I am beyond chuffed when the bloke friends me on FB.

Excellent, I think! A FB booty call! Yay! Great sex incoming!

(I should add, gentle readers, that he also seems like a genuinely nice, sweet, decent guy, but given he’s almost a decade younger than me and lives in the States, there’s clearly nothing going down: and I don’t take the perspective on these things that this gay blogger does.)

I ping him a message saying, “Hey! Nice to hear from you, I’ll give you a call.”

And that’s a nice thing to look forward to, — after spending megabucks calling my bank, which will only accept Skype calls on the sort of super-fast connections that don’t really exist in Lebanon, and sodding eDreams to ask for at least half of my money back and my tickets, please — that booty call.

It’s quite a nice conversation, if rather mystifying. He seems a little confused to hear from me, and is up to his eyeballs seeing people he hasn’t seen in eight years before he goes, but whatever, I can go and see him in the US and hang out on his boat.

No, I can’t, I say. I’m in Israel, Turkey and Greece and possibly Italy, not the US.

Well, yeah, quite, he says, knowing that full well, and then various flattering things, and off he goes.

“That was a long phone call,” says the guy whose mobile I used before.

“Mm,” I say.

I’m perplexed. Not to say a little vexed.

I’m thinking, WTF was that all about? How WEIRD is that?

Why FB friend me when you’re still in town if you’re not up for a repeat?

I log onto Facebook.

Where a different chap, also from Beirut, with the same name, who I now recall meeting last night, is also seeming rather mystified.

“Do you have my number?” he messages. Then a few more messages.

Oh f*ck, I think. Two guys.

Same name. Potentially identical (face obscured) FB profile pic.

What are the f*cking chances?

F*CK!

Gentlemen of Lebanon. If you’re going to use English names in your personal life, your professional life, your Facebook life, PLEASE use unusual English names. Something like Roland, Maurice, Eugene…

And show your motherf*cking face on your FB profile?!

Please, pretty please?!

Now, I have an extremely high embarrassment threshold.

But this exchange not only reveals how fundamentally out of practice I am but leaves me foetal and cringing, oscillating wildly between the desire to drink a bottle of tequila and the desire to hit myself repeatedly over the head with said bottle of tequila.

And, if it weren’t for the professional requirement to complete my bar reviewing and the fact that my camera was being mended, I would have found it extremely hard to even leave the hotel…

To Be Continued – Or Not?…

Now, there’s at least one more post in this potential series on my solo adventures, while the boy’s in France and England with his dadda, but I do wonder whether that would count as, well, oversharing. I’m thinking perhaps you’d rather have a picture post on the lovely wildflowers of Lebanon (which I’ll do anyway, I promise), or those shots of Beirut I’ve been promising for a while now. Let me know…

The post Dear Reader, I Am Extremely Out of Practice appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

I’ve spent the last few days bar reviewing in Beirut, solo, single, footloose and free of both fancy and child. And, while I fear Z may have been right when he said, “If you don’t watch out, you’re actually going to make a loss on this job,” (he gets it from his father), I do not regret a second of it.

I’ve written before about how much I love Beirut. And I defy anyone in possession of a pulse and an appetite for fun not to have a phenomenally good time here, particularly during the summer when the rooftop bars open up.

Now, I had absolutely no anxieties about travelling as a single, solo female in Beirut.

But I was a little anxious about bar reviewing.

You see, Beirut does not have any really tough doors.

It’s like Sydney or Singapore, not London or New York. There’s only four million people in the entire country.

But Beirut does have a strong beauty aesthetic, a focus on the bling, a love of glitter and glitz – and a love of a seriously good party – and, well, we had a car crash a month ago, and I’m now coming to terms with facial scarring.

Now, I don’t want to oversell the facial scarring thing. I’m not like those brave folk in plastic masks with half their faces destroyed, and I’m not going to go comparing it to cancer.

But, I made two bloody great holes in my forehead when I took out a window with it at 70kph, and they’re, both of them, basically still there.

I didn’t get stitches, because we were in Siwa, and I’d have been looking at Frankenstein stitch scars at best and infected facial wounds at worst. (General advice from locals: “Don’t go to the hospital! It’s dirty.”)

And, following advice from my crack team of Twitter, Facebook and Skype medical professionals – particular thank yous to nurse aunties Helen and Celia, paramedic Talon and casualty doctor Fiona – I’ve been massaging the wounds twice daily for five minutes with vaseline.

So far, the results aren’t bad. They don’t distort my expression. They’re on my forehead, so I can cover them with hair some of the time – unfortunately, fringes make me look like Woody Harrelson – and they’re clean scars.

The kind of scars that one can, in time, grow to love. In fact, I might start telling people I got them duelling in Heidelberg, although a car crash in an oasis with a Bedouin smuggler is pretty exotic too.

But, they’re there.

And they’re going to be there for a while. Maybe four years. Maybe five. Maybe the rest of my life.

And, when going out in a city as style-conscious, if not dressy, as Beirut, a lady feels sensitive about that sh*t. Even if said lady has cut her hair with nail scissors to fall over the scars.

I’m less sanguine, in fact, about my scars’ companions on my forehead, the frown lines.

I’m a big frowner. Always have been. Always will be (barring Botox, which Z doesn’t want me to get).

Also, I smoke, I drink and I stay out in the sun without sun protection.

So I have deep, deep lines across my forehead. Not good in a town full of pumped lips and lipoed tummies.

Plus, something’s up with the dental work. Too tedious to go into, and I’ll get it fixed in Egypt, but my teeth are looking especially British at the moment.

Let’s add to the mix that I’ve also been feeling rather sensitive about my body.

In (most of) both Egypt and Jordan, I’ve been dressing conservatively, which is to say covering from wrist to ankle whenever I hit the streets, and swimming in, normally, at least a singlet and shorts.

That means…

Well, tan lines.

Tan lines to the hilt.

Further, when your body is undercover, and under loose cover, for almost all of the day, the depilation routine goes out of the window, since nobody’s going to be seeing any of it anyway.

So add in a little fur.

Make that a lot of fur.

I don’t know why the pubic hair begins to extend its satanic realm around the moment the ovaries go on crutches but it’s a particularly unkind coincidence and proof that if there is a god, she isn’t corporeal.

Further, I’ve always kept good muscle tone despite doing sodall exercise (with the odd savage climb or trek thrown in), so much so that folk who don’t know me have amused folk who do by describing my physique as “athletic”. But, under two years away from forty, my tummy looks like a vanilla blancmange, I’m pretty sure I’m getting bingo wings and there’s something unpleasant happening around the knee zone, too.

Now, I’m a feminist. And, as a feminist, I know I should embrace the changes that ageing has brought to my face and to my body. But I can’t.

I can cope with some. I don’t mind the crowsfeet or the smile lines. I don’t mind that everything’s a little softer than it was. I’ve accepted that I’ve added a stone for each decade since I turned 18.

But the frown lines? I don’t like them at all.

Then there’s the wardrobe. Z and I carry our lives in two backpacks, mine a 60-litre, his a 20-litre.

Now, I have been travelling with a rather fabulous Paul Smith silk frock, some wedge heels and makeup for special occasions, bar reviewing and posh restaurants – because one needs a nice get dressed outfit – but my daywear style could be broadly, if uncharitably, summarised as “tent”.

Even if, in true Middle Eastern style, what’s underneath could be broadly, if uncharitably, summarised as “slutty”.

Yes! Hit the rooftop bars, two-tone, wobbly, tent-clad, middle-aged (according to my son, anyway) lady with the facial scarring

That’s going to work well. Real, real well.

Particularly in Beirut, where the men are up there with the men of Tel Aviv in the hotness stakes and the visiting lady is in danger of doing herself an injury on the catsclaws and anti-martyr blockades what with all the terribly distracting soldiers.

Yes, I know. Hot men. With guns.

And, yes, the guns do make them hotter.

I’m cheap. So shoot me. (Bad choice of words, I know.)

But it’s largely an aesthetic pleasure. I feel that about the girls as well as the boys.

Lebanese women are famously beautiful and it’s just so nice to see so many good-looking people around.

And so many women! On their own! Wearing whatever the f*ck they feel like wearing.

It would be form, I guess, at this point, to write about how much I’m missing young Z, who’s currently in Blighty with his dad.

Well, I am and I’m not. I love him dearly, I can’t wait to see him, and I’m enjoying his terse and emoticon-filled style on Skype.

On the other hand? Rooftop bars? Fancy-free? Bar reviewing?

That means, in case you hadn’t gathered, a legitimate excuse to go to every single one of the good places in town and drink in them. (And a lot of ones that aren’t, but, hey-ho.)

BRING IT!

And, further, the chance to wear, pretty much, what one wants.

Yep. Shoulders! Thighs! Cleavage!

I mean, I’ll settle for jeans and a vest top and a pair of heels, but my point is that I can wear that.

And that is fine.

I can walk on the street in that solo, flag a taxi in that solo, and still be fine.

Let’s face it, things haven’t perked up much on what I shall euphemistically call “the romance front” since that infamous Valentine’s Day post. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were cobwebs down there.

The last solid opportunity I had to get laid with someone I wanted to get laid by was back in Kunming.

And that was kiboshed by, god bless him, my little man.

Not in the way you’d think, either.

For, if you can imagine anything more disconcerting than getting on terribly well with a nice chap in a bar that you and your son had popped into to use the internet, then finding your son giving you the thumbs up under the table when he complimented you on your looks (chap having spent, like a decent chap, considerable time interacting with your son)…

….. Well, I’ll give you something more disconcerting than that, actually….

It’s when said nice chap grabs you outside the bar and starts kissing you, and over his shoulder you catch sight of, yes, your 11-year-old son, sitting patiently on a parked motorbike, and giving you a big grin and a big thumbs-up.

Where does one go with that?

Dear reader, where does one possibly go with that?

“Thanks for the vote of confidence, son. I’ll drop you home, stay at his and be back in the morning after he makes his flight, yeah?”

“You just sit there, son, I’ll be done with the frottage in about half an hour, he’ll promise to call me and then you can stay with me for 18 hours of adolescent neurosis about whether he’s going to call me from Hong Kong, ENJOY!”

Let’s face it, neither option is going to leave me in the running for parent of the year.

Anywise.

Night one goes OK.

My cheap foundation covers the scars just fine, I figure, with a bit of hair drapery thrown in. I may look a bit orange, but so do lots of the women here.

I meet some new people. None of them people I fancy, but new people, plus there’s this bartender that kinda reminds me of an ex-boyfriend from a long time ago, and, well, you never know.

I eat some damn fine salmon tartare, enjoy a couple of decent Negronis, and enjoy myself a lot.

But the frock’s too much for midweek (not to mention the security guard at the building by my hotel) and, while I’ve got a skirt that would hit the midweek point, I…

… Well, I need to buy some new clothes, basically.

And so, without my son along to compare the size of my arse with the 21-year-old Beiruti next to me, I invest in a pair of skinny jeans, some new slutty undies, and a top that cunningly drapes so as to emphasise the boobs and conceal the blancmange, plus a couple of functional vest tops and a bra that delivers the kind of uplift that should be banned as misleading advertising.

I enjoy a mani-pedi of such incalculable genius that I get approached by a foot fetishist on the street.

I read the Herald Trib cover-to-cover while dining on artichoke, ceviche and a glass of Lebanese rosé. (One of the wonders of Lebanon, unlike Singapore, is that by eating what I want, when I want, I have actually lost weight.)

And I head on out. And now I’m in the zone.

I am absolutely definite that Beirut, single, solo and (yes) female, is going to be a whole bunch of fun.

Facial scarring or no facial scarring. They have lighting for that sh*t, right?

The post Coming to Terms with Facial Scarring in Beirut appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

On the plus side, car hire is cheap (Advanced Car Rental offers new, fully insured little cars for $30 a day) and if you’re interested in seeing out-of-the-way places or have limited time, it actually makes excellent sense.

Herewith 12 very basic principles of driving in Lebanon.

1: If It’s In Front of You, It’s Your Problem

When driving in Lebanon, it’s wise to be aware of the Middle Eastern right of way: if it’s in front of you, no matter how it got there, it’s your problem.

Changing course and braking to avoid other road users is a normal part of driving, particularly in gridlocked Beirut, where folk will pull out into traffic the second there’s enough space to fit in a wing and pedestrians cross blind.

Just like in Grand Theft Auto, focus on what’s in front of you and what’s coming in from the sides — and don’t expect that people’s brake lights work.

2: The Horn Is Your Friend

The Lebanese do like to hoot, and, while it may not feel like it when you have someone tooting hell out of you for not jumping a red light, the horn is actually your friend. Always use it when overtaking to alert the person you are passing and in any of the many situations where someone’s driving suggests they can’t see you.

3: The Whole World Is Your Parking Lot

The Lebanese park anywhere. Literally, anywhere. I’ve seen vehicles parked on roundabouts, at traffic lights, at a 45 degree angle across the road, on motorway sliproads and on all sorts of corners, including busy intersections and blind bends.

Egregiously horrible parking, such as at traffic lights or across a road, will often, but not always, be signalled as temporary by use of hazard lights or leaving a door or two open. Double parking is normal, but triple parking generally indicates either a valet parking spot outside a nightclub or an informal workplace carpark solution.

4: Those Flashing Lights? An Utter Mystery

The Lebanese driving test is similar to the Indonesian driving test, so not many Lebanese either use or understand indicators – a series of hand gestures, “You come through!” “I’m coming through!” “Thank you for letting me out!” are much more common.

It IS worth using your indicators when driving in Lebanon, but you shouldn’t assume that other road users will register them. If moving over to allow someone to overtake, triple-check he’s not gone for the undertake before you move.

5: Blind Bends Are Dangerous

The only thing that gets between a Lebanese driver and speed is the capacity of the vehicle, which means they will overtake absolutely anywhere, including on and before blind bends.

Approach every blind bend wide and slowly, in the expectation that someone is overtaking on it, and you should avoid a head-on collision — I counted five near-misses on one half-hour crawl through the Chouf. Slow at once whenever someone begins to overtake you on or before a blind bend, because they may need the space to tuck back in.

6: Intersections Are Crazy

There is no right of way on most intersections, which are not generally signed. This means you fundamentally have to nudge and barge your way through, grabbing whatever gap you see.

Expect vehicles to be coming from every conceivable direction, including, but not limited to, down the wrong side of the road, in reverse, and turning left around you from the right lane.

7: Roundabouts Are Absolutely Terrifying

In Lebanon, roundabouts are rarely signed and rules about lanes and positioning do not really exist. So, as at intersections, find a place that has space for your car, nip into it, and then defend it against all comers.

If you’re in danger of missing your exit, hand signals come in very handy, as does braking. Parking on roundabouts, driving the wrong way round a roundabout for an exit or two, and reversing onto roundabouts are not unknown.

8: A Red Light Means “Pause”, Not “Stop”

Traffic lights in Lebanon are more of an indication of what to do than an actual instruction — if a man in uniform beckons you through one (or, for that matter, the wrong way across one), do as you are told.

Most Lebanese drivers will jump red lights if the intersection is clear and plenty even if it’s not. When turning, expect the flow of traffic to continue long after the light has turned red. Drivers can get quite cross if you fail to jump a red light when the intersection’s clear.

9: The Lebanese Love To Help

It’s worth investing in a GPS, which you can hire with your car for a few extra dollars, just to avoid the many helpful folk who will give you directions.

The Lebanese are lovely. They genuinely want to help and hate to say no. Which means that, even if they don’t know where you’re going, they’ll try and direct you there, or even lead you there in their car. If you don’t have a GPS, ask at petrol stations or army checkpoints.

10: There Are Lanes, Spock, But Not As You Know Them

Some Lebanese roads have lane markings, but these are generally disregarded, meaning that when traffic is heavy, you can expect to have one or two more “lanes” in operation than the road can actually fit. Expect to move over a foot or two to make space for other road users while the “lanes” are transitioning.

11: If They Act Drunk, They’re Drunk Or On The Phone

There ARE drink-driving laws in Lebanon, but I would dearly love to see what kind of driving counts as erratic enough to attract official attention.

During the summer party season the rooftop bars and mega-clubs of Beirut, Jounieh and Byblos stay open till dawn and beyond, so expect a lot of road users to be drunk, sleepless and/or high both late at night and in the early morning. And quite possibly on the phone as well.

12: Might is Right

In a not uncommon adaptation of conventional rights of way, small vehicles give way to big vehicles. Why? Because if you collide, they’ll win.

But, you know what?

With the notable exception of getting lost on the way back from the airport, where Z was adding to his extensive unaccompanied minor credentials, once I’d got used to it, I found driving in Lebanon (with the exception of parking) actually kinda fun. Does this make me warped?

The post A 12-Step Guide To Driving in Lebanon appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

But first we need to find somewhere to stay. The guidebook recommends Al Fanar, up by the lighthouse, so I figure we’ll wander up that way.

“Do you know where Al Fanar is?” I ask the chap with the moustache, who, it emerges, is German.

“Sure,” he says. “It’s up past the lighthouse. But we have a room here if you would like to look at them…”

It’s a nicely decorated restaurant. Clean, slick lines, what looks like fake Phoenician statuary on the back wall, but classy fakes, and none of the kitsch you’d typically get in a portside restaurant. The pricing looks good. And they’re lovely folk.

“I’d love to,” I say. “How much?”

Some confab with his Lebanese boss, Elio. “$60,” he says, rather nervously. “It’s in the old town, over my house.”

“OK,” I say. “Let’s take a look…”

We wander along the little fishing port and into the narrow streets of the Christian district of the old town, with its arched windows, churches, some buildings already carpentered and pastel-painted, others still bomb-damaged from the 2006 war with Israel.

While Tyre Old Town is less chocolate box pretty than the medinas of either Byblos or Sidon, it is in some ways all the more interesting for it – in five years, if war doesn’t intervene, the whole thing will have been poshed up to Byblos-style perfection.

We pause to say hi to Elio’s wife: she is two years older than me, looks younger, and her oldest daughter is already married. For all its urbanity, Lebanese society remains in some ways quite traditional. 38, here, is really kinda old.

And we come to our “room”. A huge, glazed studio with two terraces, one at the front to watch the night fishing fleet go out, the second with views over flat roofs and ancient churches. We have sofas, a coffee-table, a dining table, a kitchenette, twin beds and a wetroom, all done out in dark woods. Result!

“Wow!” says Z.

“It’s lovely,” I say.

“How many nights?” Elio asks. We’re his first guests in this new venture.

“We only have one night,” I say. “Z’s flying out to England the morning after tomorrow to see his dad, and we need to be at the airport at 7am.”

I wish we could stay longer. We both wish we could stay longer. But all we have for Tyre is part of a day and then we need to be back in Beirut.

“This is basically his mancave, isn’t it?” says Z, after Elio has gone, “When I’m a man, I want a mancave JUST like this. With dark wood, and dark sofas, and a TV on a stand.”

The next morning we wander back through the old town to the port, which is lined with guys smoking, drinking coffee and mending their nets in a rather desultory fashion: it’s a Sunday, after all.

We’ve left Elio in peace, because he’s been working late, but he comes to find us — being neither Lebanese nor UNIFIL peacekeepers we stick out like a sore thumb in Tyre — and invites us to breakfast in his restaurant.

I take a bit more of a look at the fakes along the back wall. One of the sculptures, a glazed terracotta affair reminds me a lot of a sculpture we saw in Alexandria, its style indefinably, rather lumpenly, Phoenician.

“She’s a Phoenician queen, a queen of Tyre” Elio says, pointing to the marble bust beside it. “That’s Roman. The coins are a mixture of Roman and Phoenician.”

My god, I think. OF COURSE THEY’RE NOT FAKES. We’re in Lebanon!

Z and I pore over the coin collection, capturing one that we think is Julius Caesar, along with a pendant with the face of a longdead queen.

“Where did you find them?” I ask.

“Just out in the sea,” Elio says. “I have a tank, and dive with a tank, but at 3 metres, 5 metres, you find lots of coins, even in the harbour, so sometimes I dive without a tank. And there’s a place, 500m from here, where you can see the ruins of the Phoenician houses under the water, and swim over them, and find things.”

“I WANT TO DO THAT!” says Z.

“I know,” I say. “But it’s going to be like fossils. You’ll need to take time looking until you get used to spotting what you’re looking for.”

“Some fishermen found Phoenician gold out here,” explains Elio, himself a fisherman by trade. “The government took half, but they made $90,000.”

“THAT’s what I want to do,” says Z. “I want to come here, spend the week here, and go diving for treasure!”

Of course he does. Who wouldn’t?

“Let’s come back,” I say. “Let’s come back and spend a week here and go diving for treasure.”

We take a wander through the Old Town, Ottoman era streets lined with shops selling plastic flip-flops, spangly stilettos, sparkly handbags, mobile phones and kids’ toys, stalls selling sweet cherries, apricots, the green, furry fruit that hides crisply succulent fresh almonds, stopping at shoe shops to enquire about boys’ sandals, size 37.

Everyone is most insistent that the 36’s fit. They don’t.

Z will, having tried almost every kids’ shoes shops in Lebanon, be heading to London and Paris in Matalan sandals held together with superglue. Hey-ho.

The first set of ruins we come across, the Al-Mina site, would have wowed us, were it not for the fact that it’s not just Z who’s got ruin fatigue.

We inspect them in a rather desultory fashion.

“What’s that, Z?” I say, testing him.

“Hypocausts,” he says. “Colonnade. You know, I don’t really find Roman ruins all that interesting.”

“Mm…” I say. After the bright colours and narrative verve of some of the wonderful tombs we saw in Egypt, the scale of Petra, the complexity of Byblos, another Roman era settlement seems, well, a little bit dull. “But I still think we should see the hippodrome.”

“Why?” he says.

“Because Al-Bass has the biggest and best-preserved hippodrome in the whole world,” I say, “And we’re currently in walking distance of it so it would be stupid not to. AND there’s a triumphal arch.”

And — oh my! — it’s gorgeous. We walk down an avenue lined with jacaranda, bougainvillea, spring flowers and sarcophaguses, a necropolis that’s quite utterly lovely in the bright sunlight.

The triumphal arch appears ahead of us, a huge great thing, 20m high or so, built by Hadrian.

“Wow!” I say. “Look at the restoration on that! They did a brilliant job, didn’t they?”

“It’s been restored?!” says Z.

“’Zactly,” I say, smugly. “You would never know it had been restored.”

In general, Lebanese restoration jobs seem to be rather subtler than the style favoured by Egyptians and Jordanians, making their sites more rewarding to visit. Lebanese ruins feel like ruins. Just, good ruins.

A colonnaded avenue, home to shops and stalls, brings us to the formal entrance to the hippodrome.

“Imagine this,” I say. “Imagine coming through here on a race day, Blues versus Greens, the street full of people selling chickpeas and cups of wine, as many as ten thousand people pouring through the gates into the hippodrome – hey! Have you seen Ben Hur yet?!”

“What’s Ben Hur?” he asks.

“Historical epic,” I say. “Similar era to Spartacus and The Ten Commandments. It’s about chariot racing… ooh! Will you look at that?”

“Not much left of it, is there?” says Z.

Two sections of the stepped grandstand from which spectators would watch the races survive, as does one of the pillars the chariots would have turned around.

“There’s enough to see how big it was!” I say. “Look at it!”

We explore around the grandstands, the tunnels under them where stallholders sold their wares, and try and imagine how Tyre would have felt on a race day.

And then, too soon, it’s time to go. Back in our little car. Back to Beirut.

Where Z will head off to London, Paris, Broadstairs and Norfolk for some long-overdue time with his dad, three of his four grandparents and his friends, and I will be single, solo and bar reviewing in Beirut, then having a little writer’s retreat in Dahab.

The post Exploring Tyre Old Town appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

I mean, clearly the motorway HAS ended.

I’ve just driven through a checkpoint manned by South Korean soldiers and adorned with signs about the glory of Korea and petrol cans full of concrete decorated with the Lebanese cedar flag to find the road terminating at a grassy bank.

But it wasn’t supposed to end here. And, yet again, my 11-year-old navigator is failing to deliver.

“That depends what you mean,” Z says. “We need to get the coast road.”

“This IS the coast road. The motorway IS the coast road,” I say, irritably. “LOOK AT THE MAP. The blue and white thing,” I hiss, ignoring Luke Skywalker in the X5 behind me, who’s making like our car is Princess Leia before Obi Wan Kenobi spilled his guts.

“The COAST ROAD. Does it reach Tyre? Or have we overshot? I can’t stop on this road. You need to MAP-READ.”

“Yes, the ‘blue and white thing’ DOES reach Tyre, and, as I told you last time, it goes all the way to Naqoura and the Israeli border,” my son says, dripping venom from every audible quotation mark. “But, the ‘blue and white thing’ is a motorway UNDER CONSTRUCTION. So we need to take the coast road. That’s the red road.”

“Oh,” I say, feebly. “Did you look at the key?”

“Yes,” he says. “I couldn’t work out what was going on, so I looked at the key.”

“Oh,” I say. “Well done!”

And they say kids learn nothing from travel!

We drive blind for a couple of k until I hit a T-junction and the guy behind me overtakes without so much as a flash of his hazards to tell me to f*ck off.

Which is nice of him. I don’t think I’d have been so charitable in the circs.

But I have no idea which way the coast is from here, the moon is up, and at just a few miles from the Israeli and Syrian borders, I’m not inclined to take a guess.

Roadtripping Lebanon is bracing enough without coping with chaps driving without lights, on their phones and out of their skulls in the dark, not to mention checkpoints that have put up their catsclaws for the night and are feeling a little bit jumpy about Syrian insurgents.

So I slap my hazards on, roll the window down, and ask the next chap in a pickup who bothers to slow down to check for oncoming traffic, “Sour?”

That’s Lebanese for Tyre, the home of Tyrian purple, the birthplace of Dido, and our destination for the evening.

He spews some rapid Arabic, makes some hand gestures and points me left.

This road is wide enough for three lanes of traffic in many parts of the world, two in Australia, so five in Lebanon, but has no lines on it, which means that at any given point there could be four people overtaking each other simultaneously.

Something’s on my outside.

It’s the pickup! Now, in many parts of the world, I’d feel threatened by this. But here I just slow to a crawl, wind my window down, slap my hazards on and look at him enquiringly.

“Straight on!” he says in Arabic. “Then left at the end.”

He chucks in some hand gestures to make it even clearer as we crawl along. Two vehicles overtake, simultaneously. And then he U-turns back the way he came, having completed his good Samaritan act for the day.

Another thing I love about Lebanon? The Lebanese are TOTALLY helpful.

And, unlike the helpful Lebanese who’ve been taking us on 100kph magical mystery tours of the Chouf because they want to help me out with directions, usually concluding at an army checkpoint or a garage where there might be someone who knows, THIS Lebanese actually knows the way!

Result!

Lebanon is a small country, but a mountainous one, and we have covered a lot of miles today and I am, well, tyred. (Sorry!)

We’ve inspected the taxidermy at Moussa Castle, pootled around Hezbollahland, and what was supposed to be a straightforward 30 minutes on the motorway to Tyre – that’s the Tyre of Homer, Virgil, the Old Testament – has turned into yet another sodding mystery tour.

“Well,” I say, as we emerge from a stretch of polythene farm tunnels and mechanics into some rather scruffy-looking suburbs. “This has to be Tyre! Look! It has a mall! Ooh! They do kid’s sandals! Do you think they’ll have some in a size 37?”

Silence. Z has resigned himself to arriving in Paris in sandals held together with superglue. Me? Well, it seems a little harsh for his poor dad to have to do the shopping, plus it’s not really a good look pour moi.

“Look!” says Z. “There’s a Burger King Drivethrough!”

“No,” I say. “We need to find where we’re staying! Anyway, I’m not eating Burger King in Lebanon. The food’s too good.”

“But it’s a drivethrough!”

“NO!”

A roundabout. Aaarrggghhh!

These things just spring out at you in Lebanon. They sign sharp bends from time to time, but intersections and roundabouts don’t seem to be worth flagging.

“Look at the map!” I say. “The guidebook map, and the map map. That sticky out promontory up there looks like it might be the old city. What do you reckon?”

“It’s on the coast,” Z says.

“Yeah,” I say. “I’ll just follow the coast and we should hit the old port.”

I have a good feeling about Tyre. Most governments recommend you don’t visit it, partly because of terrorism but mainly because it’s in the Israeli border zone that’s policed by UNIFIL peacekeepers and if Israel and Hezbollah do get their respective knickers in a twist again it could be difficult to get out.

And Z, who’s been itching for a Caramel Frappuccino for his last proper breakfast in Lebanon and is convinced that there won’t be a frappuccino anywhere outside Beirut, is warming to it rapidly.

We pootle rapidly along an expansive Mediterranean corniche that narrows into a little portside way and a charming little fishing port.

A charming little PHOENICIAN fishing port, no less.

“Do you reckon I can get through there?” I say.

We’re outside a couple of little restaurants, only, I figure, a few hundred metres from the place where we intend to stay.

There’s a Merc parked on one side and a rattletrap on the other, but it’s a little car, so we make it through just fine.

And then…

Oh f*ck! They’re rebuilding the road. And, there’s a car coming at me. This means only one thing.

Reversing. In a right-hand drive car.

Through a tight space with an expensive car in it and another one coming at me head-on and the omnipresent threat of ending up in the harbour (I’ve seen this happen twice in Asia, both with motorbikes, but all the same…)

REVERSING. In a brand new hire car that I’m supposed to give back, unmarked, the day after tomorrow.

Nope. Not gonna do it. Gonna sit here and play dumb until HE reverses.

Obviously, he’s not moving. He ain’t going nowhere.

A collection of chaps begin to make helpful (and, so far as I can tell, polite) lady driver hand gestures, along the lines of “Come back, come back, come back!”

Now, much as I moan about gender stereotypes, I would actually agree that, while most women drivers are better at avoiding moving vehicles than most male drivers, we are collectively much, much worse at scraping things that are sitting quietly behind us or off to one side, like, y’know, walls, and harbours, and concrete planters full of flowers, and brand new Mercedes.

In fact, I would be beyond happy if I could just throw the f*cking keys at someone with a Y chromosome and ask him to do it for me. Where is valet parking when you need it?

Honestly, anything more sophisticated than reversing into something to turn round, going straight back the way I came, or parallel parking in a substantial space with minimum pressure, fills me with absolute terror. It’s just…

…It’s going backwards! And you have to look at things backwards in the mirrors! And they’re never in the place they look as though they’re in. And your wheels don’t behave the same way they do when you’re going forward!

And it’s a righthand drive car. So everything’s in the WRONG PLACE.

OK, maybe that’s just me…

“You can’t go through there,” says a chap outside the restaurant in French. “You need to come back.”

“I know,” I say, pulling out my finest Franglais for the occasion. “Je déteste le parking! Je n’aime pas rouler en revers! C’est horrible!”

Z, I observe, is visibly cringing. Only five years to go, and he’ll be able to park the car for me!

In fact, he’d probably do a better job at it even now, what with knowing his left from his right and having a Y chromosome, and all…

“Straight back,” the chap says, in French. “Allez, allez, allez… Tournez! Peu plus, peu plus! Arretez!…”

Oh, thank god, I think, as I snuggle in between two parked cars, following his precise instructions.

I’m out of the way of the car. And he’s such a nice helpful chap.

I’ll have to get out of here in the morning, but tomorrow’s another day.

“Allez, allez, allez!” say the other guys.

So I can’t park here? B*gger.

I don’t see WHY I can’t park here, given the Lebanese seem to park anywhere they bloody feel like, but apparently there are some rules.

So now I have to park the sodding thing without hitting any of the four vehicles in easy striking range, any of a range of pedestrians, or, for that matter, landing up in the harbour, the flower planter, the lamp post or the anti-martyr concrete block affair.

With an audience of approximately eight guys, all giving me directions and clearly finding the whole thing absolutely hilarious, it’s almost worse than the road to the lake of farts.

I can’t just throw my keys at one of them and plead with him to park it for me because a) that would be childish and b) he might put it somewhere so cunningly tight that I manage to hit something on the way out.

I need to grow a pair and park the goddamn car, BUT I am starting at an angle rather than parallel to the car, so I can’t use my usual method of lining up with the indicators to tell me when to engage full lock.

At least all my guys agree, which is good (one time in Bali a chap directed me, mercifully slowly, into a tree, rather tarnishing my faith in male directions). “Allez! Allez! Allez!”

“Full lock,” they indicate.

“Straighten up!”

There is some banter and much laughter, in which I participate.

I am female. I am a tourist. I am in a hire car. And I am signally failing to park it.

That is, whatever country you are in, intrinsically hilarious.

At least I’m not blonde any longer, I think.

Z, I notice, is crimson.

Excellent! I think. I’m almost there!

And then I can get out of this car and never look at it again.

It is only when we are actually out of the car and I am babbling embarrassed thanks in three languages while facepalming vigorously that I realise I had about three metres space behind me and have parked right up the arse of the rattletrap.

Well, I say “parked”.

The Indonesian language has a series of increasingly transitive verbs (“I sleep”, “I go to sleep”, “I put the baby down to sleep”), and I guess I’m looking for something close to “I have been put into the parking place”…

Yep. My parking is so execrably bad it needs a whole new language to describe it.

“Mum,” says Z. “That is the most embarrassed I think I’ve ever been in my entire life.”

“I know,” I say, laughing. “Have you seen the size of the space? I could have parked a bloody bus in there. Even me! Bwahahahaha!”

The post A Dignified Entrance to the Historic City of Tyre appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

In the Sinai, we walked in the footsteps of Moses; we trailed Cleopatra down the Nile; assuming Israel lets us in, we’ll be seeing both Jerusalem and Bethlehem.

But to see Tyre and Sidon, the ancient cities of the Phoenicians? To me, that’s like reaching Xanadu.

Even if almost all that remains of their culture is their legends, like their huntress goddess Astarte and her lover Adonis, whose blood still turns the river by the caves of Jeita red each spring.

Now, my degree was in Latin, Ancient Greek and Philosophy, a discipline I suspect may be in decline now young Brits actually have to pay for their studies.

And Tyre was the home of Tyrian purple, the dye made from the murex shell that coloured the cloaks of Roman emperors, tinted the curtains of Solomon’s temple and draped Helen of Troy.

Dido was born here, before she founded Hannibal’s Carthage and fell so destructively in love with Aeneas, the ancestor of the folk who razed Carthage to the ground.

Sidon was home to Jezebel, the “harlot”; Paris and Helen spent their honeymoon there.

Jesus withdrew to the cities of Tyre and Sidon; ancient prophets called down curses on them; Nebuchadnezzar razed them to the ground.

All in all — and, you should, by now, know how very, very much I love Lebanon travel — to be on the trail of the Phoenicians was exciting.

With these high hopes, though, Sidon (Saïda in Arabic) was… well, a letdown.

Honestly, with its dinky little Crusader sea castle, its beautiful Old Town, its palaces, its restored Ottoman inn and an absolutely fabulous soap museum, Sidon should have been wonderful.

And would be, if we visited again.

As it happens, the circumstances were less than ideal. I was feeling most atypically vomitous, the first time in years this has happened to me without mixing beer, red wine and dark spirits, or being pregnant. (For the record, I hadn’t, and I’m not.)

And, without wanting to whine overly, Lebanese roundabouts are difficult enough to negotiate when you’re not being sick in your mouth at the precise moment the guy who’s parked on the roundabout pulls out in front of the guy in front of you and someone else decides to cut the crap and take the shortcut (clockwise) to his exit.

There are, I think, five of the suckers in Sidon.

Further, of the two non-horrid affordable hotels in town, one was closed and the other’s manager was out of town.

Now, I like a nice hotel as much as the next person, but paying for one simply to worship the porcelain god in relative comfort was… well, less than ideal.

Ahem.

Moving swiftly on… We were in Sidon for the Temple of Echmoun, the Phoenician god of healing, which boasts the best-preserved Phoenician ruins in the world.

These are them:

Yeah, the square thing.

That’s the base of an enormous temple, long ago cannibalised by waves of incomers.

Which doesn’t, IMHO, vaut le voyage. Or even le hotel.

Tyre, on the other hand?

Now, Tyre is somewhere I could easily spend a week.

And if it weren’t for my parallel parking skills, we would never have discovered its joys…

The post On the Trail of the Phoenicians – Sidon appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

And below are the bizarre creatures that produced it: silk moths, at the end of their entirely captive lifecycle, crawling out of their cocoons, unable to fly, and starting, almost instantly, to breed again.

I like the way the two pictures form similar patterns. How about you?

The post The Friday Photo: Silk and Silk Moths appeared first on EscapeArtistes.