Love Thy Neighbour

"Sprechen Sie Deutsch?"

Slightly taken aback by this somewhat incongruous opening line, I rack my brains for the remnants of my now long-distant A* at GCSE German.

"Ja, ein bischen. Warum?"
"Bist du Deutsch?"
"Nein, Ich bin Englisch"
"Well why dintcha say so ya Pommie bastard?! Ya don't look like a Pom anyway. Spose that's a good thing right mate?"

At this point, I think I did well not to have a heart attack. Here in a small mountain town in northern Lebanon, I am being (playfully) abused by a fair dinkum Aussie bloke. Life is truly full of surprises.

Fred is Lebanese, born here in Bcharre, but spent 27 years living in Sydney. He speaks English fluently, with a strongly Antipodean accent. It turns out he's by no means alone around here. Bcharre is the stronghold of Christianity in Lebanon, the historic seat of the Maronite sect who have ruled this tiny country for almost all of its short history since independence from the French. When the bloody civil war, initially at least fought on sectarian lines, exploded in 1975, thousands of people from this area fled Down Under. Now, after 17 years of peace, they're back. Indeed, there are so many of them that "G'day mate" seems a more common greeting than the "Salaam aleikum" or "Bonjour" usually heard in Lebanon. There are so many of them in fact, that Bcharre, a small yet staggeringly beautiful town overlooking the Qadisha Valley, even boasts its own "Kangaroo Supermarket".

Fred invites me to walk with him. We stop at the Kangaroo to pick up a chocolate bar.

"I'm diabetic ya see. Must be all them barbecues! Nah mate, let me get it, it's my shout."

We stroll the length and breadth of the town, taking in the spectacular views, munching our Galaxy bars and talking: sport, politics, history. Like almost everyone in this area, Fred is a Christian. His views on his Muslim compatriots, while not as hostile as some I'll encounter today, do not imply a harmonious future for this divided country. The treatment of women, the ascetic eschewal of the good life so beloved of many Lebanese Christians, the huge families: these will become familiar anti-Islamic refrains as I meet the people of the Qadisha Valley.

Yet it is not easy to stereotype these views in one way or another; political and religious feeling here is a complex and multi-faceted phenomenon. Fred is no Christian proselytiser; his condemnation of Islam's inequities is mirrored by a deep distrust of the Church. Despite his own personal faith in God, he disdains organised religion as "brainwashing", and rails against those who would twist peaceful teachings into instruments of war and violence. However, this condemnation of violence, specifically suicide bombers, does not preclude a deep sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians and a visceral hatred of the many iniquities visited on them by the Israeli occupation. Unlike those in the south of Lebanon, for whom Israeli incursions have proved a very painful reality, however, Fred is more sanguine about Lebanon's belligerent neighbour.

"This country has a choice ya see, either we go with the Americans and the British and the Israelis, or we go with the Syrians and the Iranians. It's quite simple really. And I tell you what, I don't like what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians, and I don't like what the Americans are doing in Iraq, but I know who I'd rather live like."

Fred's relatively pro-Israeli symptahies are by no means unique in this area. He introduces me to a good friend of his, "Ron", who "lost his arm in the War, fighting with Samir Geagea and those boys". In "From The Holy Mountain", author William Dalrymple comments on his sudden realisation that the friendly and hopsitable people he met in Bcharre were doubtless among the perpetrators of the infamous massacres of thousands of Palestinians in the Beirut refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in 1982. Now I know how he felt: Geagea's Lebanese Forces militia were among those implicated in the Israeli-orchestrated atrocities.

After chatting about his Brazilian wife over a strong sweet coffee in his living room, I left Fred to go explore the major local tourist attraction, the gallery and museum of renowned Lebanese poet, artist and mystic Khalil Gibran. Some 200 surreal paintings later, the naked female form featuring prominently in most, I emerged into the sunlight, and walked back towards the main square to catch the bus to Tripoli, from where I would return to Beirut. I had only gone a few paces, when a car pulled up.

"Bonjour! Ca va? Tu es Francais?"

"Bonjour, ca va bien. Je suis Anglais"

"Ah, English, very good! I'm going to Beirut, you want a ride?"

"Yeah, sure, why not?"

And so I met Pierre, another local Christian, and another member of the Australian connection; his girlfriend, while of Lebanese extraction, hails from Sydney. Despite the distance, he is convinced she is the one for him - she visits a couple of times a year, and speakl for at least four hours a day on the phone. How sweet. Pierre's faith is so devout, he insists on visiting a local shrine before we depart; after much self-crossing and prostration we head off down the mountains. The sign of the cross makes a couple more appearances - each time we pass a Church in fact - but before the fears of kidnap at the hands of an evangelical grow too large, conversation turns to some rather unChristian topics. Had I, for instance, yet visited a "super nightclub" in Beirut? Thinking that BO18 was indeed "super", I replied in the affirmative, whence I quickly discovered that "a super nighclub" is in fact Lebanese code for what we Brits rather less euphemistically call, "a brothel". For a mere US$250 it seems that one can procure the services of a charming Russian or Ukrainian lady for a full six hours, which Pierre assured me would be the best six hours of my life. And to think I'd settled for a retracting roof and loud trance music!

Pierre, however, despite living the good life like any Lebanese Christian, also has a serious side. He works as a "detective" for the Ministry of the Interior, specifically "looking after" prisoners. I don't push for more details, though he does conspirationally share with me the rather dubious statistic that 90% of Lebanese prisoners are Muslims, of which most have committed heinous crimes of rape, murder, secual abuse etc. Of those few Christians currently doing bird in Lebanon, the vast majority are guilty of only "minor things, less than 10 years in jail like". There then follows the familiar invective about mistreatment of women, unrestrained procreation, and predisposition to violence.

Like Fred, Pierre fears for the future. Rather ominously he warns me that "Lebanese Christians are nice people, very friendly and kind, but if you try to fight them, they will never forget, never let you go." As I drink a graciously-offerred free beer, while enjoying a free lift back to Beirut (a journey of some two hours), and reflect on a day of unparallelled, humbling hospitality at the hands of Bcharre's Maronites, I think back to one-armed Ron and the massacres at Sabra and Shatila. If it comes to war - and after the Presidential election in a few weeks it just might - the Christians of Lebanon will not shirk a fight.

You couldn't hope to meet nicer people anywhere. But you wouldn't want to cross them.

Beirut: Bombers, Beers, BO18

"Oh my God, it was scary down there man, there were bombs going off, bullets flying, that was some pretty darned crazy shit going down, man!"

The American is sweating, visibly shaken from his daytrip to Baalbek, the fabulous Roman ruins for which Lebanon should, by rights, be famous.

"At Baalbek?", I answer, somewhat incredulous. For while Baalbek does indeed lie deep in the Hizballah heartland of the Bekaa Valley, it's Lebanon's number one tourist attraction, and a most unlikely venue for a show of strength from Hassan Nasrallah's battle-hardened guerillas.

"Yeah man, it was like scary!"

"Today, at Baalbek?"

"Yeah doood, dontcha ya believe me or something?"

"It's not that, it's just I was at Baalbek today. Those were fireworks you heard - for Eid."

I'm afraid to report this conversation really happened, in the foyer of a hostel in Beirut.

Aside from the apparently disappointing (to some) absence of gunfire and shelling, hostile guerilla activity in the Bekaa is all-too evident. The fearsome souvenir salesmen outside the entrance to Baalbek are truly a force to be reckoned with. Perhaps if Israeli PM Ehud Olmert had visited for himself, he might have thought twice about attacking a force clearly so doggedly persistent and determined as Hizballah. I personally escaped with only one Hizballah t-shirt; others were not so lucky. All manner of flags, caps, posters and the like are on offer, all in the tasteful shade of yellow with which the "Party of God" advertises its services to the world. I will certainly never wear that t-shirt outside the house, but personally I think it's a small price to pay for having escaped with my life from the gunfire, shelling, and bombing at Baalbek that day. Erm...

There is a great irony, of course, in an ascetic Shi'ite Muslim sect basing themselves, and their souvenir sales, outside the Temple of Bacchus, famed as the God of wine. The ruins of Baalbek are so spectacular and so exquisitely preserved it's really not difficult to imagine oneself surrounded by concubines, engaged in some Bacchanalian hedonism of the sort so abhorred by the "great" monotheistic religions (what's great about them I'm really not sure, but anyway).

For those whose powers of historical imagination don't extend to drunken orgies in honour of Roman gods, Beirut provides plenty of opportunities for nocturnal enjoyment. In fact I'd venture to say it has the best nightlife in the world. Yes, even better than Bogota. Though much of my weekend in Beirut remains little more than a slightly hazy recollection, a few memories endure. The Lebanese reaction to flaming sambucas was priceless, as was the awed response of a couple of English teachers who currently reside in Irbil, northern Iraq. These people may have endured war, terrorism, invasion and the like, but clearly nothing had prepared them for the sight of two drunk blokes from Leeds setting fire to alcohol in their mouths. From now on I think I shall call my party trick, "Shock and Awe".

Yet while John and I may have surprised the locals with a little sleight of hand and tolerance for flames, Beirut had the last laugh. Around 3am, I strolled back from the bar at BO18, Beirut's most famous nightclub. A fresh breeze wafted across the dancefloor. "Wow, they've turned on the airconditioning" I thought to myself. As I looked around for my friends, I glanced at the ceiling, where much to my surprise I saw a spectacularly realistic projection of stars and clouds. It's difficult to describe my shock when I (finally) realised the roof had been retracted to create a massive open air club, soon to bathe in the warm orange glow of the sun rising over Beirut, beautiful people (and nowhere can people be so beautiful as Lebanon) moving to the beats as a sonic wall of trance music enveloped the club and the streets above.

It was a very long night. As we sat recovering in a cafe on the beautiful Place d'Etoile in Downtown Beirut, surrounded families sitting enjoying the Sunday afternoon sunlight, children playing happily in the pedestrianised square, the British government's advice to avoid "all but essential travel" to Lebanon seemed patently absurd. But wait, what's that? Suddenly a rocket hurtled from the sky into a table at the next restaurant. Two more followed in quick succession. Then more. They were raining down from the sky. Everyone burst out laughing. They were children's toys, made of foam.

Rocket fire in the main square. Just another day in wartorn Lebanon.

Lost...

I wake with a start as the bus halts suddenly. "Where am I? Shit, I think I missed my stop. There's a tank pointing at me. What the hell?"

I've fallen asleep on buses before of course.

When I'm incredibly drunk, a kind of reflexive self-preservation instinct takes over, and despite being almost unconscious, I somehow manage to stagger to the night bus stop on Tottenham Court Road, from where my alcohol-sozzled mind knows with absolute certainty the bus, any bus, will take me home to Islington. A cab would never work - only a bus will do. Any bus. Of course this is not strictly correct - only one of the buses goes to Islington - and in any case I haven't actually lived in Islington for three years. No matter. I inevitably fall asleep and wake up some hours later in a remote, and inevitably hostile, corner of the capital, from where I will battle my way back home through the mean streets of north/east/south/west London.

Despite these early hours experiences of locations as unfriendly as Walthamstow, Wood Green, and Leytonstone, however, I've never found myself confronted with a mobile artillery piece. Not even in West Ham. Things get worse when I notice the sign by the side of the road. "Trablous, 1km". Great, I missed my stop in Byblos. I'm in Tripoli.

I wasn't intending on visiting Tripoli at all. Lebanon's second city is supposedly off-limits to tourists since the recent, well-publicised violent hostilities between the army and Sunni militants in a Palestinian refugee camp to the north of the city. Indeed, the ever-cautious British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, who currently "advise against all but essential travel" to Lebanon as a whole, specifically recommends avoiding "war-torn" Tripoli. Still, as I'm here...

In the event, the FCO were probably correct about Tripoli. Not on the grounds of safety or security of course - aside from tanks and roadblocks on the outskirts, Tripoli seemed less edgy than Beirut even - but because it's mostly quite dull. The contrast with Beirut, especially the upscale areas, is quite staggering. A wonderful medieval souq, a Crusader castle, a mostly conservative Sunni Muslim population. No Chanel boutiques, cleavages, or cafe lattes here: visiting Tripoli was like taking a daytrip back to the Middle East.

After passing a pleasant, though unremarkable afternoon wandeing the labyrnthine alleyways of the old city, I picked up a share taxi for the 90 minute drive back to Beirut. And from here my transport difficulties began once more. As the aging Mercedes cruised along the seafront highway into Beirut, a beautiful sunset dying the sky a verdant crimson, my driver asked where I wanted to be dropped off. The conversation clearly did not go as well as I thought - minutes later I found myself in an unfamiliar neighbourhood in South Beirut. No matter - this would afford me the opportunity to explore some more of the city - if I walked long enough in roughly the right direction, surely I'd find my way eventually?

An hour later, it is now pitch dark. There are no neon lights on this street, no Lebanese Army checkpoints, no German sportscars parked outside plush apartments. There are, however, hundreds of posters of a dimly familiar, bearded, bespectacled face, and countless yellow and green flags bearing a logo with a Kalashnikov. I've seen that flag before. I struggle to read the Arabic inscription on one of the many banners. "Hiz...Hizb...Hizba...Ah. I know what it says. 'Hizballah'." At this point I must admit to feeling a little nervous. I'm lost, after dark, in a Hizballah neighbourhood in south Beirut. While I'm not at all convinced by the Western media's oversimplified demonisation of Nasrallah and his army as Iranian-sponsored terrorists, while I know they are a respected political party as well as a highly effective guerilla army, while I know all about their hugely effective social and community work among the poorest of Lebanon's citizens, still...

Suddenly there is a huge bang and a bright flash of light. A rocket screeches into the air just in front of me. For a moment I am totally transfixed with fear. Just for a second I come very close to losing control of vital bodily functions. Then I hear the children's laughter. I look to my left, from where the missile just launched. In place of the cadre of keffiyeh-wearing, AK-47-toting mujahideen I fully expect to see, three small boys argue over who will light the next firework. Yes, that's right. A firework.

Just as I'm digesting this revelation, I am tapped on the shoulder. My still slightly nervous Arabic greeting "salaam aleikum" is met by a smiling response. "wa leikum a'salaam". Five minutes later I am sitting in a taxi, conjured from thin air as if by magic by a couple of charming men who simply couldn't do enough to help the lost foreigner. Not for the first time I feel more than a little guilt about my misplaced assumptions.

Fifteen minutes after that I sit in a pizza restaurant in the upmarket suburb of Hamra, listening to the excited English chatter of fashionably-dressed students from the nearby American university of Beirut, sipping an ice-cold beer and munching some excellent bruschetta. 20 minutes ago I was dodging Hizballah "rockets"; three hours ago I was wandering a four hundred year old souq.

Just another normal day in Lebanon.

Welcome To Lebanon

"Where are you from?"
"England. You?"
"Jerusalem."

I do an obvious and not very subtle double take. An Israeli, in Syria? Never!

"Jerusalem, Palestine".

Aha. That makes more sense. Omar is a 24 year old Palestinian Christian, who works in his family's "import-export" business, splitting his time between the West Bank, Dubai and Beirut. We're sharing a taxi from Damascus to Beirut, and he's very kindly helping me through the border formalities, which are complicated by the fact that visa fees must be paid in Lebanese Lira, unavailable outside the country itself. In effect, therefore, to obtain Lebanese currency to pay for my visa to enter Lebanon, I have to sneak accross the border into Lebanon, change some currency, then return to obtain my visa and enter legally.

Omar and I approach the smiling, heavily-armed border guard and explain my predicament.

"Where you from?", he asks me with a grin.

"Britain"

"And you"

"Palestine", Omar responds casually.

"Syria, or Lebanon?", the guard asks.

"Palestine."

"Yes, yes, but are you Syrian Palestinian or Lebanese Palestinian?"

"Jordanian Palestinian".

My confusion at this point aptly sums up the wretched plight of the Palestinians. Omar is Palestinian, lives in Israel, but has a Jordanian passport. The guard, however, is satisfied.

"Ok, you British. British are trustworthy and honest - I let you go. Don't run away now..."

And with a wink, he waves me across the border. Omar doesn't comment on the savage irony of British "honesty": the decades of betrayal, broken promises, and lies with which Britain damned his people to eviction, occupation, and persecution at the hands of the Israelis. No, instead Omar is much more interested in talking about Beirut's legendary nightlife, "the best in the Middle East", he calls it. While I'm saving that particular brand of hedonism for the coming weekend, I have to say that Beirut is something of a culture shock after 5 weeks in Syria.

My initial joy at finding cafes and restaurants not only open during daylight, but packed with customers actually eating and drinking, was tempered slightly by the discovery that prices here are even higher than in London. In fact in many respects downtown Beirut resembles London, Mayfair to be exact: its 19th Century architecture, plethora of ludicrously expensive designer boutiques, exquisitely dressed women tottering from cafe to cafe on their impossibly high heels, giant sunglasses protecting them from the Autumn sun. The large mosque at the end of the street seems rather incongruous amid its opulently Western surroundings; with conversations in French and English far more common (in this area at least) than Arabic it's easy to forget this is the Middle East.

Yet this is the Middle East; in many ways more so than anywhere I've been thus far. Beirut's mass of contradictions and confusions is a microcosm of the cultural schizophrenia that afflicts the region as a whole. For 17 long years those contradictions found expression in a brutal and bloody civil war in Lebanon, in which Beirut was both the symbolic heart of the conflict and the physical epicentre of the fighting. After 16 years of relative peace and stability, the Lebanese capital was once again turned into a warzone by the failed Israeli invasion of 2006. Tensions from that catastrophe and the ongoing campaign of political assassinations still simmer here; you don't have to walk more than a few blocks to find clear evidence that this is a city on edge. While Damascus has its fair share of armed soldiers on the streets, the young men with machine guns here seem a different proposition entirely. Unlike their poorly-equipped, lethargic Syrian counterparts, the soldiers here seem professional, well-trained, and ready for action. Unlike the Syrian youths and their rusting weaponry, the Lebanese have tanks, barbed wire, and roadblocks on the streets.

Yet while I may find it odd to see a couple of artillery pieces parked outside McDonalds, the locals don't seem to notice. Equally they appear to happily ignore the odd bombed out building that clutters the otherwise impressive skyline, picking their way past the rubble to get to their valet-parked BMWs, Porsches, and quite unbelievably, yellow Lamborghinis (of which I've seen two already). In the circumstances, there seems little else for it but to follow suit. For all its political turmoil and violent history, this seems a beautiful, engaging city populated by beautiful, engaging people; it's hard to believe that somewhere so chic, so consumerist, so Western is little more than a couple of hours from Damascus.

Of course not all of Lebanon, or its people, resemble Park Avenue or Belgravia; countless thousands of Omar's Palestinian kin live in squalid refugee camps outside Beirut, Tripoli and other major cities, while south Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley are home to mostly Shi'ia populations, natural supporters of the much-maligned Hizballah. I doubt Hassan Nasrallah will be joining us for an all-night rave at BO18 on Saturday, but you never know...

For those that are interested I have finally managed to upload my remaining photos of Turkey and the first batch from Syria. Al hamdu lillah for Lebanese computers.