Tripoli

We left Beirut this morning at a respectable time to take the bus up the coast to the Northern city of Tripoli, back past Byblos towards the Syrian border. Just after Beirut at Jounieh, the mountains come down to the sea. They are green and heavily built upon, mainly with high-rise apartments. Above Byblos, the mountains were lower and further back and the development along the coast even scrappier than it had been further south. A pity the Lebanese, who are obviously very proud of the beautry of their country seem to be doing their best to destroy what they have. The cedars have all but gone... trees 1,500 years old, felled to make a staircase or a cupboard. Rubbish is thrown out of car windows and just piled up on the streets or by the side of rivers, to be flushed out to the blue Mediterranean with the spring waters. The coast is destroyed by haphazard developments, no doubt making money for the friends of local and national politicians. And then they had a war and fought against each other for so many years.
Anyway, we made it to Tripoli in good time and eventually found our hotel after having been sent to al-Kourah square, instead of al-Koura hotel. The room was fine, cool and quiet, although teh place was as good as deserted.
We were promised that Tripoli would be like Syria, with its old souks, mosques, madrassas, markets and hammams, and so it turned out. We spent the best part of the day wandering around, chatting to anyone who seemed like they wanted to spend some time chatting to two foreigners, drinking coffee, eating cheese toasties, nectarines, grapes, tea, looking at soap manufacture (from olive oil - like in Aleppo, only they claim here that theirs is better than Aleppo's - Fred ended up buying a soap to be used to wash hair which stimulates hair growth), being invited in to watch carpenters making furniture, to visit a shrine, to wander around an old hammam, visiting the crusader castle on the citadel (no explanation at all), looking at the war damage here - lots of bullet marks on the side of buildings, having a look at the garbage area, which doubles as the river, looking at views out to sea and taking photos of as much as we could..... unable to upload today as the computer here does not register my camera.
The whole day, we would have seen maybe three or four other western tourists wandering around, at what is the height of the tourist season. We spoke to a man at the end of the day who claimed he was the head of the Tripoli tourist board but he was keener on talking himself than listening to any comments we had to make. Tripoli has a lot to offer but does a bad job at presenting itself to tourists. The tourist information office is far from the old town, there was no explanation for anything up at teh castle, despite them asking 4 euros entrance, there were labels for most of the main old buildings, but again no explanation of when they were built, there are no provisions for showing tourists how to get to the mountains and valleys, which are said to be so beautiful, no signposts to the hotels, few maps, few rubbish bins and so on.... I don't mean to complain, and it is great having the city to oneself, as it were, but we feel they could do themselves a favour.