Safe driving in the Lebanese Alps

The morning after I arrived back in Dubai from our last visit to California, I had to leave on a trip to drive Volvos in Beirut. In reality, we would spend little time in the city, which has a reputation as the nightlife capital of the Middle East (whoop-dee-doo), traveling instead to a ski resort about an hour and a half outside of town. You can find my thoughts on the C-30 here if you're curious.

Two summers ago I stood in a small San Francisco rug shop talking with my friend Jason about the prospects of moving to Dubai. Jason is American but holds an Iranian passport courtesy of his Dad, and at that time was the only person I knew who'd ever really spent time in this region. I bring this up because I remember that Jason, who fully expected to visit during our tenure here (and in fact now lives in Tehran and comes through regularly) mentioned the possibility of a field trip to Beirut. My reaction at that time was to calmly reply, whatareyoufuckingnuts?

Living in Dubai changes your perspective in a lot of ways. For instance, I've been forced to get over my mall allergy because, for many of life's necessities (free wi-fi and the simple act of leaving the house) there's no where better to go, especially in the summer months. But what really happens here is that you're forced to confront your own xenophobia towards the Arab world, a place that, for all it's peculiarities, is just another assembled mass of status obsessed, distracted, over-caffeinated people who want to eat cheese burgers and watch Oprah. 

So yes, Beirut is a place that people go to on a regular basis because, as Jason told me that evening a few years ago, "it's not like they don't know when things are going to start blowing up." When I was in LA on the Cadillac trip last year, I befriended a younger Lebanese journalist who said something similar: "I think there will be war again before too long, it's inevitable. But then, we're used to it. Last time people kept going out to the clubs and living their lives, we just stayed away from certain areas."

Nothing was exploding while I was in Beirut, and it seemed like a a city that would merit further investigation. On the surface Beirut felt a lot more modern than Fes, perhaps a little like Tangier but without the Medina, but then I really only saw it from the cab so who knows.

This I can say for certain, Lebanon has some very nice mountain terrain and ski resorts. After we drove each of the four Volvos, which is too many for one day if you ask me, we then had lunch and a short break before mounting quad bikes and tearing off into the cold and sunny afternoon. And so we noisily and somewhat stinkingly traversed what would have been a very good hike. Which isn't to say that it wasn't fun, it was. 

After a while we stopped for a snack that had been trucked in on an old Land Rover Defender, which belonged to the hotel. This was some what unusual, as often on these types of trips you'll find that every vehicle is from the host company's family of products. But this was a smaller scale trip and we kept finding ourselves dining or departing under giant banners depicting GM products. If anything, it was refreshing to be in an environment that was a little less obsessed with branding. Also, the food was good and that always wins me over.