Day 2 - Jaita and Jbail

The bike has yet to come out of the box, for I spent the day a few kms
up the coast from Beirut, looking first at the famed Jaita grottoes,
and second at the ancient town of Jbail / Byblos.

Experiencing the rush-hour traffic around Beirut, I have to say I was
glad that the bike remained in the box. B roads were few and far
between, and the main road would have been a multi-lane affair (but
for its lack of any discernible lane markings).

Arriving at Jaita, I was prepared for enormous disappointment, the
moreso because of the busloads of vacationing gulf arabs dragging
their kids to this "must-see" attraction. However, the caves
themselves lived up to this billing - they were spectacular. Upon
entering the upper grotto, one is met with an impressive display of
limestone stalactites / stalagmites, looking suspiciously like coral
that's traded undersea for underground. Further in, the white light
transitions to a deep red, the ceiling rises into an impossibly high
vault, and it starts to feel as if you're descending into somewhere
quite sinister. Staring at what appear to be bottomless fissures into
the abyss, I felt that all I needed was Virgil as a guide and I'd be
in some weird Dantean fantasy world. (Will, if you ever film the
Inferno, this is your set for one of the circles.)

Byblos, by contrast, was heavenly and extraordinarily beautiful - the
pictures I posted earlier do it no justice. It had the winding, narrow
and still inhabited streets of many medieval towns, but sits atop
ruins bearing witness to the passage of just about every important
civilization in the last 8000 years, as well as the genesis of the
alphabet which, after being pinched by the greeks and adapted by the
romans, you are now reading. In short, the view made me recall all
those times American friends have told me how we have "so much
history" in England, and reflect that, though this may be true, what
London is to New York in this regard, so Byblos is to London.

Tomorrow: Roman ruins at Baalbek, in the Lebanese Bekaa valley,
hopefully dodging Hezbollah on the way.

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