Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
As we drove to Beirut the Syrian driver regaled us with his view of the Lebanese question
and he was adamant that it was Hariri's son and not Syria who assassinated Hariri.
At the checkpoint there was a long line of trucks. The customs post is only open during set
hours and the trucks simply had to wait their turn. If you didn't get through before closure
time you had to wait for the next day and so on. .
It seemed that the military were the primary service providers at the checkpoint. There was
plenty of activity and as we waited for the documentation to be finalised, we would see bus
operators coming in with large wads of passports for clearance. I noticed one driver hold-
ing a large wad of Iranian passports.
We stopped for a drink once we had cleared the border and chatted to the driver as he had
his breakfast. It was relatively early in the morning but the traffic was heavy and many of
the vehicles were old style American sedans, or what are sometimes described as 'old yank
tanks'.
As we travelled, the driver pointed out areas that were predominately Druze. He said that
although they claim to be Muslim, they did not observe Ramadan and did not pray five
times a day, “So how could they be?”
The road skirted a bridge that was being re-built following damage from Israeli bombing
of some years ago. There were also an increasing number of advertising signs along the
roadway with most of these in English without any Arabic script. Many also depicted what
you might call unislamic images of young women in western clothes.
The road dropped steeply down to the city through a landscape with scattered cedar groves
and in the distance we could see the Mediterranean. Houses abandoned during the Civil
War were strung out along the roadway, the owners having left the country and never re-
turned. Some of these were quite substantial but damaged in various ways. From time to
time there would be washing hanging out a window of an otherwise destroyed building. It
was evident that people were living where they could, regardless of the conditions.
There were checkpoints, soldiers with machine guns, camouflaged and sandbagged shelters
and military vehicles, just about everywhere.
Buildings covered with bullet holes were standing alongside new high-rise apartments.
There were Christian churches and more signs in English featuring women in various pro-
vocative poses, with one sign being slightly obscured by a sandbagged military checkpoint.
