We got up around 9am feeling excited about Beirut, Hassan especially as he had only been to Saudi Arabia outside of Syria. We got breakfast from the same place that Feras had bought the Arabic pizzas from the previous day and ate them in a taxi to the centre. There we met Russian Masha and her French boyfriend Joel who Feras and Hassan had arranged with to go to Lebanon, we all got the bus from the centre to a bigger bus station outside town. About 200m from the station our bus broke down, stopping in the middle of the road, fortunately reverse still worked and the driver backed up to let us off and also to get another bus which had pulled over.
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| From Beirut, Lebanon |
In our eagerness to get an early'ish bus, we arrived far in advance of the actual departure time so we sat and talked in the ticket office hall. We were all super excited about going but Hassan especially I think he was dying to experience some of the party scene in Beirut which is fairly famous throughout the Arab/Muslim world for being one of the most open and hardcore party scenes in the middle east. Eventually we got on our bus which had air conditioning! And we started the three hour trip to Beirut. The border crossing was okay but not the quickest with a bus load full of people. We stopped, got out and paid departure tax for Syria, got back in, drove a few hundred metres, got out and lined up for a stamp, got back in and drove from Syria to Lebanon where we got out, queued up in the wrong place were told that we needed to pay for our visas, something which ha very recently changed because we should have got them for free according to the guidebook. While I kept our place in the correct queue Djalma went to cash money out, when he came back the queue hadn't moved at all and we had a nice long wait till it was our turn. We handed all four passports over the counter together to try and speed things up, the first one to be checked was Djalma's and the border official was surprised and said that he had a Brazilian passport too, he and Djalma chatted for a bit, he was really friendly and then he gave us all one month visas for free. It saved us each 25,000 and his friendliness and generosity put quite a spring in our steps – a good omen for the country. We got our visas and showed them to more guards before getting back on the bus.
We had another hour in the bus driving from the Syrian border to Beirut on the coast. A small window kept opening with the vibrations from the occasionally bumpy road and let increasingly humid air in, Like a turkey before Christmas I was suffering well in advance and by the time we were dropped off at the bottom of town, at the bus station, I felt like I had been sweltering in 100% jungle humidity while I was still comparatively cool in the bus. The wet heat was horrible, it was mid afternoon the sun was up and we all had heavy backpacks. We asked around for directions to the re-constructed down town area, where Masha and Joel had a hotel reservation, and were told five minutes walking time. One hour later, clothes plastered to our bodies, faces and bodies dripping we made it to the general vicinity of the hotel and so began the refined search for the hotel no-one local seemed to have heard of. Passing through a big square we were handed free energy drinks dripping with condensation from cool packs. Pussy. Oh yes, there's a name with a none too subtle reference to the fairer genders baby making gear. It was well received though and gave us the energy boost we needed to continue our search for the hotel, not to mention plenty of fodder for genitalia jokes.
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| From Beirut, Lebanon |
After lots of different directions from lots of different people we ended up at the hotel. We sat down in the lobby, thick air pushed around the room by a couple of hard-working fans – heaven, and waited for Masha and Joel to be shown to their room and to check availability for Djalma and myself. The hotel was fully booked so we left our bags at the hotel and after getting directions to a “cheap” hostel 300m away, we headed off in that direction to try our luck.
Fortunately there was plenty of room on the roof and we got mattresses for 10USD each, the most expensive and also the noisiest room so far. We were happy though, 10USD is the cheapest going rate for somewhere to sleep and beat the 20USD per person that M and J's hotel offered for a shared room four people.
We sat on the roof overlooking the port and chatted while I plucked out the ingrown hairs on his shoulders – that's love babe. Soon enough it was time to get going and I stopped the one way grooming session to go and wash my sticky body and then get ready for our night on the town. By the time I had finished in the shower it was almost seven o'clock, the time we had arranged to meet them at their hotel, needless to say we were late and in the end they came to meet us. All five of us headed out, Dutch Derek (with the most enormous calf muscles) who we met briefly in the lobby of MJ's hotel, Masha and Joel (MJ from here on in), Djalma and myself, all five of us excited about tasting some of the infamous Beirut night life.
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| From Beirut, Lebanon |
We walked along a main road near our hotels, home to lots of bars all of them expensive, we walked up and down a couple of times with walking beers in hand checking out the price of beer. 7,500-9,000 about 5-6USD, pretty damn expensive and the cocktails were almost double that. We stopped in a Jazz bar which we left after a bit of debate about the cover charge, it was a nice place but too expensive to drink in for me and big D. I felt quite bad, Masha was really keen on staying, Derek really wanted to start drinking, Djalma and Joel weren't too fussed but I couldn't imagine staying there without feeling bad about the cost. We headed back to a place called Spoon, which we had already passed on our scouting mission up and down the road, and ordered some cocktails. They were the same price as in the Jazz club but without the cover charge it seemed much more affordable and very strong. I think we all felt like we got our moneys worth but they weren't strong in a good way and it took as a while to finish the only drink we ordered that night. I started feeling pretty rubbish, I personally believed that it was germs from Feras that gave me the cold but that might be some residual bad feeling, after we finished our drinks we pretty much all agreed that we were done and went back to our hostels with plans to meet for the following day.
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| From Beirut, Lebanon |
Djalma and I crawled into our sleeping sacks on the roof, a night club booming out dance tracks all through the night and the traffic racing past on the roads below didn't do much to stop sleep – we got out the earplugs planned for Tel Aviv and were asleep in minutes.
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