I really had a lovely time in Byblos (Jbeil in Arabic). I went up last Sunday on a surprisingly comfortable bus (I'll write about my trip to Baalbek one of these days). The bus station, which was a real bus station (I'll write about my trip to Baalbek one of these days), made it very easy to find a bus to Byblos. Of course, it being Lebanon, there is no real bus schedule - we left when the bus was full enough to justify leaving, but in the end I only waited about a half hour before we took off.
It was the getting off which was the adventure. See, the bus systems operate on a hop on wherever you want, get off wherever you want basis. I knew that. But I had assumed the bus would actually stop at a station in the five cities from Beirut to Tripoli. As we all know, assuming makes an ass out of you and me. So I see the sign for Jbeil and realize the bus isn't going to get off the highway, so I shout as we pass the Jbeil exit. Of course, the driver doesn't speak English, so the army guy next to me and the guy in front of me shout at the driver to stop (no one ever claimed the Lebanese aren't helpful people - in fact, they are known for their hospitality, and there is no exaggeration there.) So the bus pulls over to the side of the highway, where cars are going fifty miles per hour or so, and I am dropped off there. Imagine a bus dropping you off on the side of an interstate highway.
At this point I was about a mile from the exit, so I scrambled up the hill on the side of the road to get off the highway and start walking. I snapped the photo of the banana tree on the side of the highway to commemorate this going bananas way of transportation. What can you do but laugh in this kind of situation? It wasn't too long before I saw a nice coffee shop where I could get out of the heat and sit down with the map so I could figure out where the heck I was supposed to go to see the old stuff. It was actually pretty simple. I walked in the direction I thought I wanted to go and stumbled into a twelfth century city.
So I walked around the city and the old crusader castle and then I had a nice lunch of fresh fish, hummus, and tabouleh and a couple Almaza beers while staring out at the Mediterranean. I got to choose my fish. To be honest, I've never eaten a fish still on the bones so when they handed me a spoon for the fish, I had to improvise. At least they took the eyeballs out. The lunch was at Pepe's Fish Club, a restaurant that used to serve the rich and famous back before the war - Marlon Brando ate there every time he went to Lebanon. Now it caters to tourists, and I couldn't help feel a bit of sadness at that. But hey, I wouldn't have gotten to eat there back in its glory days.
After lunch I wanted to go on a boat ride but couldn't find where you caught the boats. I think perhaps they had shut down for the day, maybe because of choppy waters, maybe because they just wanted to. So I walked around a bit, stopping at the beach and two twelfth century churches, both which were preparing for weddings. I walked around the tourist shops, stopping in at the place with the 100 million year old fish fossils, before going to the side of the road to catch a bus back to Beirut. It was like hailing a taxi on the interstate. All in all a good day.
I'll post the castle photos in another post.
Byblos (Jbeil) is the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, according to some accounts. It is said to be founded in 5000 BC by the Phoenicians, who so graciously gave us this thing we call an alphabet. They actually called the city Gebal. It was the Greeks who gave it the name Byblos and for some reason us Westerners still call it that even though its official name is Jbeil.
While the castle itself is not so big, the entire area of ruins of the medieval city is pretty extensive, and it was fun to walk on the paths between tall grass full of geckos and birds I've never seen. I wondered if snakes could be in the grass. I didn't know if there were poisonous snakes in Lebanon but I knew they had them in Egypt and later I found out that Lebanon does indeed have vipers and in fact they are called Levant vipers. They also have Palestinian vipers, puff adders, and saw-scaled vipers. Leave it to me to think of something irrational to be afraid of. I was glad I didn't have on shorts despite it being ninety something and my clothes being soaked. There probably aren't even any snakes in such a touristed area but I heard something in the brush (that turned out to be a gecko) and my life flashed before my eyes. Of course, I'm not afraid of war breaking out in Beirut or walking past militia buildings with M-16 wielding men or wandering narrow streets in unfamiliar neighborhoods and I had no problem darting across roads in the insanity of Lebanese traffic, but when it comes to animals or airplanes, those things freak me out.
In addition to the castle, part of which is shown here to the left, the grounds holds two temples, one called the L Temple because it was an L shaped temple and the other called the Obelisk Temple because it has obelisks. Creative. There's also a place that was used for nymph worship. All of these predate the castle by thousands of years. The whole area is one archaeological site on top of another. I'm not sure there's a country on the planet that has been controlled by more rulers than Lebanon. One group would conquer another and just build right on top of what was already there. In many ways, they're still doing it. The rich people in Lebanon (who aren't always Lebanese but often come from the Gulf States) start to build, discover ruins, and just build on top of it.
