Lebanon - Bekaa Valley

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Tuesday 3 June


Today we are to visit the Bekaa Valley and Baalbeck.

This is the heart of Hezbollah country – their headquarters are apparently in the village close to the site of Baalbeck. We are told we will see a lot of tanks and soldiers but requested not to take pictures of the soldiers. We are going very close to the Syrian border. We are assured that we will not be in any danger. While we are visiting the site of Baalbeck, Richard and I take a quick walk around the nearby village. We are harassed by a little boy trying to sell Richard a pair of socks. He hangs on to us and becomes more and more agitated as Richard walks on and starts clinging to Richard's shirt. I get in between them and say a very firm "no" and turn away but as I do so he pinches me on the arm very hard so that it stings. We don't hang around but later hear from other fellow travellers that there were Hezbollah T-shirts being sold in the village. We would definitely have bought one if we had seen them.

The Israeli invasion of 2006 destroyed 10 years worth of infrastructure in this small country and we see plenty of evidence of it as we travel to and from the Bekaa Valley and snap photographs through the coach windows.

There are a lot of damaged and abandoned buildings and private homes, a particularly graphic bombed out bridge with the middle missing and a railway tunnel which has obviously been a target and much much more of this devastated landscape. 90% of bridges throughout Lebanon were destroyed.

What a tragic waste.