Two Legs In Lebanon: Part II

In 2010 I’d been in Lebanon for about four days before I headed to a town called Bcharre (again precisely how it’s spelled), locally famous for its spring water, and located very near to one of Lebanon’s ancient Cedar Groves. I paid a taxi driver from a beautiful little city called Byblos, which sported a crusader castle of some magnificence, built on the foundations of a Roman Temple, which was built on the foundations of a Greek Temple, which was built on the foundations of a…you get the idea.

In the Fertile Crescent the life you see is simply the tip of time’s iceberg. But the taxi driver, a friendly, pudgy man, took me to his wife’s little bakery for breakfast, showed me some of the sights on the way, proudly showed off pictures of his son who was in the military, and was generally a congenial temporary host. I rode in his aging Mercedes, of which most of the functions seemed to have ceased a long time ago, including the odometer which had stopped moving after the car hit 553,876 kilometers.

In the area of Batroun, or thereabouts, a number a cement factories were painting the wind a charcoal color and I discovered that cement was a big Lebanese export. “The fucking cement, they cut off the tops of mountains just so they can ship it to Saudi,” my driver moaned, and this refrain is fairly constant for much of the Middle East. The Saudis are somehow responsible for every ill that has befallen them, well, at least when it isn’t Israel. To be fair, the Lebanese have been screwed over by pretty much everyone over the years, with Syria and Israel bringing the brunt of the insanity most recently. I wouldn’t be surprised if Genghis Khan, Charlemagne, and Hirohito had all tried to invade them. After seeing Lebanese women for a few weeks most men can understand why a general would want to detour his army there for a little while. Anyway…

When we arrived in town the taxi driver took my bottle of store bought water, emptied it on the ground, and filled it up from the fountain in the middle of town that connected to some mountain spring. I asked one of the local restaurant owners where I could find young people drinking too much, this being a Saturday after all. He told me there was some kind of local festival going on in the next town, Hachet (maybe that’s not quite how it’s spelled). Not only did he inform me of this raging little event, he got in his car and drove me down there, about 3 miles down the road.

We started driving along the level highways the bisected Bcharre and went out of town, but before long there was a turn that went very, very steeply downhill. He stopped the car and pointed down the unlit vertical drop and off I went. The entire village was composed of thick stone structures, built on the hillsides and leading down into a kind of town square in the valley. The streets and alleys and lanes were absolute pandemonium. Noisy kids and teenagers darted around my peripheral vision as if powered by their own screams, and the windows on both sides of the street were all filled with friends and families, smoking out of hookah pipes and drinking beers.

Climbing into the mountains in Lebanon a day earlier I quickly learned that my ideas of “Arab” would have to be redressed. By the time I had reached Bcharre the only image I could conjure to compare the town was the beautiful German mountain towns near some of my extended family in Noinkirchen (exactly how it’s spelled), near Frankfurt. The orange-tiled roofs of the stone homes clung to the shadowy sides of hills and mountains while individual buildings nestled between evergreens. Hachet (hatch-eat) and the long train of coastal and mountain towns were far more reminiscent of Greece and Southern Italy than Dubai or Baghdad. Lebanon is quite simply more of a Mediterranean state than a “Middle-Eastern” one.

I wandered aimlessly through the crowds wondering what the hell everyone was so excited about. The well apportioned churches of the town had their giant wooden doors thrown open and people were dressed up and milling around. Further inquiries at a few of the town’s tiny, basement bars alluded to some kind of “saint’s day” or “st. somebody or other day.” There was surprisingly little English spoken, but the village was slightly removed from the tourist traps. The breakthrough came when I found the biggest open space, much like a town square, or the quad on a college campus.

The square was dominated by the skeletal concrete of an unfinished building that rose five stories behind a truck filled with bored looking police who were smoking cigarettes. This shell, devoid of walls and windows, which would look like a great place for a crack den under normal circumstances, was an entrepreneurial oasis. Every floor had a great load of housewives and husbands slinging beers and snacks from out of coolers and refrigerators. Bottles of propane rolled around like the final scene in Jaws, and wires were strung in ways that would make a pyromaniac blush. On the fifth floor I ran into a bunch of college kids who were home on break from universities in the capital (Beirut) and were much better English speakers than the random passerby and townie bar fly. I sat around and had a few beers as random speeches by elected officials rang through the Christian, Arab town, and soon after that a band started playing and the square filled up with dancers.

At first the mass was indistinguishable, and slowly a circle formed. The dubke, that odd little 4-move dance which I’m not entirely sure crosses religious lines, grew and grew until it consumed the entire open space in front of the stage. The old and the young and the middle aged and the teen-aged and the twenty-something the MILFs and the cougars, the spinsters and the adolescent all holding hands and moving somewhat off-beat with the music, which may be what makes it so compelling and oddly difficult for us outsiders to get. At my friend’s wedding one of the Lebanese cousins told me that the secret to the dubke was that, “it doesn’t follow the beat of the song that’s playing; it has its own beat.” It exists as its own silent song, measured simply by the steps of the dancers.

It was the dancers themselves though, that interested me more than the dance, the smiling happy mix of people who should be bored, the ones that find themselves at home at Skybar or any of the other chic nightclubs blasting out trance from the rooftops and alleys and bomb shelters of Beirut. Something nostalgic flared within me watching the celebration. I couldn’t put my finger on it at the time, but it reminded me of a parade, of a 4th of July weekend. This is what culture really is, it’s the radiation of joy that compels every generation to share the same moment at the same time. It’s the event that you pile your teenage kids in the car next to grandma and grandpa for.

I watched the circle spread like a virus and consume the severed generations of the Christian mountain town and felt that I was witnessing something that few tourists do, a genuine, unguarded moment in another culture. My friend’s wedding provided any number of the same moments, but this one was completely unexpected, which made it potent. The dubke kept growing even as the music changed from an upbeat tune to a kind of dirge, and exploding from the alleyways and the tops of houses were shards of silver aluminum, reflecting off of the lights like chaff from an escaping fighter jet. Beneath the waves of silver came a bride and groom, prancing through the streets and through a hole cleaved through the dubke with their groomsmen and bridesmaids in tow.

They all danced their way up to the stage where something of significance was said and done in a language I didn’t understand. There was much applause and cheering and drinking, and then the wedding party was down the stairs and surrounded by the circle again. The young guys were now preening much harder than before, maybe due to the appearance of bridesmaid cleavage, and many started incorporating all sorts of spins and flips and bravado into the dance. The wedding took place inside of a festival and as inexplicably as the bride and groom arrived they disappeared down the same alley.

After Bcharre I got into the next 40 year old Mercedes with a few hundred thousand miles on it, and another helpful, pudgy cabbie took me further east, to the Bekaa Valley. Before this detour from the Christian held mountain towns and the social and religious melting pot of Beirut I had no idea what could have caused all the problems in this beautiful country. We were rolling up and down the mountains of central Lebanon, watching tourists run off the sides of cliffs with hang-gliders. On the shadow clad floor of a valley a steel American flag covered a road sign.

“They grew drugs here. America bought all the drugs,” my cabbie informed me.

“And what do they grow here now?” I asked.

“Apples.”

This was the last fertile plain under Christian control before we hit the Bekaa Valley, and they too found it much more profitable to grow opium than apples or wheat. America, for whatever reason, did the reasonable thing and bought the drugs and then subsidized the growing of anything but drugs.

Why we haven’t done this in Afghanistan? I don’t think anyone really knows. Virtually all of our anesthetics in hospitals are still derived directly from the same plants that produce opium and heroin. At any rate it was odd to see the ole’ stars and bars in this little corner of Lebanon. I was very quickly to discover what drew the gaze of the American state department.

Not twenty minutes down the road the cab driver informed me that we were leaving Christian territory. The dividing line could not have been starker. As soon as the cab driver told us that we were in a Shia region the stone villages and bi-level homes had turned into shacks and shanties on the side of the road. The dust rose up and choked everything and men stood on the side of the road wiping the brown silt off of their watermelons and produce. There didn’t seem to be running water or electricity across the invisible line and the shacks kept multiplying deeper and deeper into the bled, away from the highway.

Soon we started climbing again, and towns and villages began to appear. The driver then began a new refrain. “From Iran.”

“Those generators, from Iran.”

“That hotel, from Iran.”

“That hospital, from Iran.”

And this continued ad nauseam until we reached the city of Baalbek. I don’t know how much the cabbie actually knew and how much was bias or hearsay, but it painted an interesting picture of some of the dicier aspects of the Muslim/Christian/Druze/Sunni/Shia divides in the country. These get reinforced, subtly, almost everywhere as I continue traveling and paying attention to them. The city of Baalbek, in the heart of Hezbollah territory (Shia, for those of you not making the connection, is the same sect of Islam as mainstream Iran, the majority of people in Syria, and the powerless majority in Bahrain) has one of the most magnificent set of Roman ruins on planet Earth.

“Don’t take any pictures on the street,” the last words of my taxi driver, “only in the ruins.”

He painted a bleak picture of the people of the eastern part of his country. I don’t think it was entirely merited, but I didn’t and still don’t really know anything about the people of eastern Lebanon, and embracing your own ignorance is of paramount importance to any traveler.

I was dropped off directly across from the fence that guarded the Roman temples. Despite the absolute immensity of the ruins the area looked depressed. If there was tourism money coming into this site it wasn’t filtering into the town very well. I ate a big meal at a very passable café and dumped my backpack under a staircase in the restaurant, overcoming the cabby’s reservations and deciding to trust the “troublemaking Shia” with my belongings.

There isn’t much to say about the Roman temples here that pictures can’t say much better. They are, according to the plaques at the site, the largest temples ever constructed, or even attempted by the Romans. Unfortunately all that’s left of the biggest structure are about a half dozen free standing columns, which are simply massive. The smaller temple, dedicated to Bacchus, is still almost entirely intact though. And even this is a gigantic structure. It is worth noting that the ruins are so old that the graffiti on the walls of the temples now qualify as historic. It seems there were a lot of French explorers in Lebanon in the early 1800’s, or at least a few very tall Pierre’s who could put their names high on the rock.

Through the exit tunnel of the site the sunset spins strands of phosphorescent gold around the walls, and the last thing many tourists see is the small museum that chronicles the finding, unearthing, and protection of the site. As I peruse the artifacts, mainly tombs and tools and mosaics, I am somewhat surprised to find that the ruins have been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1983.

This is a surprise because much of the power of the ruins is transmitted through the empty spaces between the walls and columns. Air blasts around the walls, the sun beats down across the dirt and brown grass, and as I move from shadow to shadow trying to frame the immense pieces of Rome in the camera I never have to dodge other tourists. This magnificent place is a ghost town. For 27 years this spot has been recognized as a historically and culturally significant remnant of the human race, but I could have found more people waiting in line at a Burger King.

Outside a small man hoists chotchky plastic jewelry and yellow Hezbollah shirts. Suffice to say I didn’t buy any…this time. The sun began its descent while I ventured with my giant backpack (which I thought was a good way to notify people that I was too goofy for the CIA) around the city of Baalbek. I never strayed too far from the ruins, and other than some curious looks nothing seemed out of place. After I got tired of the markets (after a while a market is a market is a market) I began asking for directions to where the mini-buses cruised over and picked up people to go to the next town.

In Lebanon I often traveled in a little, white mini-bus, these seem to have filled the void left by a lack of public transportation (though I did take an actual bus once) and the expense of having a car. These little buses drive fast, erratically, and stop on a dime. People waited in spots along all the highways into and out of Beirut, and new mini-buses arrived and departed every few minutes…everywhere. They were often pretty full already when they stopped for me. Though there were other travelers and backpackers I rarely encountered any on the mini-bus, but I met Lebanese of all shapes and sizes. I imagine the only demographic you wouldn’t find on the bus are the wealthy. Often soldiers would get on and off, as well as college students and the elderly. And despite the tight quarters I never had any problems or issues with the drivers or other passengers. I was on one of these mini-buses on the way to Zahle, a little wine town, and then after drinking all night headed back to Beirut with what I thought was a hangover. I would spend the next six days in Beirut as sick as I've ever felt in my life.

Two Legs In Lebanon

I have been to Lebanon twice now, and the experiences were as different as if they’d been two distinct countries. The first trip, backpacking alone, was consumed with the history of a country through which so many ancient and modern armies had tread, built and destroyed. The second trip, to a wedding in the mountains, and surrounded at all times by a group of people, was locked invariably in the life of Lebanon as it is now, detached entirely from the past. This seems common of any place though, history does its best haunting in solitude and silence.

A week ago I landed in Beirut with the bride and groom, an American guy and his Lebanese betrothed. We met the best man in the airport and piled into a tiny rental car, our bags between and on top of us as the bride-to-be pumped the manual transmission in high heels through Beirut and up the slick and narrow mountain roads to her village, Kfardebien (and that’s precisely how it’s spelled). The mountain roads around Lebanon seem to defy physics, climbing straight up at insidious angles which may or may not flatten out briefly for a hairpin turn before continuing the next ascent. Our driver, speeding up those slopes, passing trucks around the corners and doing it all in heels was my first indication that the mountain people should probably not be fucked with under any circumstances.

After 40 minutes the car shed the best man and I at a hostel before continuing on to the bride’s house. We were left in the company of some other wedding guests who had arrived before us, in a place that was about 25 degrees colder than I had expected. The weather reports on Beirut, a few thousand feet down, said it woul stay at about 75 degrees for the duration of the trip, and I had packed accordingly. Our bedroom may have actually, impossibly, been even colder than the air outside. So there wasn’t much left to do but sit on the terrace and crack into the bottle of Jack I bought at the airport.

I slept in every stitch of clothing I brought with me, and woke up sometime in the late morning. I wandered about half a mile down the street and found a friendly, portly fellow named Pierre cooking little Lebanese breakfast foods in a restaurant. Pierre’s place and the Shisha (hookah) bar a block up the mountain from the hostel would mark the extent that I would travel for the next two days. The groom was busy driving around the country procuring blood tests and paperwork of some kind so that the mountain priests would relinquish one of their daughters into the custody of an American (who was Christian, just not particularly the right kind). We would see him for stretches of about 15 minutes at a time which consisted mostly of grunts and audible sighs before he got a phone call and left to go somewhere else.

In the meantime the best man, a wizened Canadian wedding guest, and I drank Almaza, the wonderfully refreshing national beer of Lebanon. We drank on the balcony of the hostel when we woke up, and then moved to the Shisha bar and drank more, and then moved back to the hostel to finish off the nights with a few swigs of Jack before crashing again. Then, there was gambling.

We had each brought a black suit and black tie (excluding the Canadian, sporting a white linen suit) which was supposed to be complimented with huge black sunglasses and a black fedora so that we could roll into the Casino du Liban in the style of the groom’s favorite movie protagonists, The Blues Brothers. Apparently the Fedoras were harder to come by than expected so we just ended up looking like the mentally handicapped bodyguards of an eccentric drug dealer.

In our mind’s eye the Casino du Liban had that fatalistic Mediterranean charm of an old James Bond set, full of mystery and intrigue. There would be models in evening gowns blowing on the dice of the princes of Gulf Kingdoms and Montecarlo playboys looking to go native in Arab lands. The first indication that we were horribly wrong was that our tiny rental didn’t look remotely out of place in the parking lot, next to so many old, beat up jalopies. The dress code had considerably slackened since the casino’s hay day and the flock of gamblers lined up at its tables had all the charm of a sleazy Atlantic City casino…on a Wednesday. The casino’s few female inhabitants were dressed in sweaters, and many a Lebanese grandmother sat with cigarette dangling from her mouth, pumping coins into the slot machines. As the best man remarked, “I think we crashed this party about 40 years too late.”

But we made the best of it. This was the bachelor party after all. We wandered around the tables for a bit and since between the four of us we had two former addicts, the alcoholic drank water while playing blackjack and the gambling addict sat at the bar drinking whiskey while watching the poker games. After a few hours I was down, the groom was up, and the bride whisked in and led us back to the mountains.

The next night we were treated to a pre-wedding reception of some kind at the bride’s house. All the westerners attended as did the extended mountain family of the bride. We were swarmed with all kinds of food, Lebanese moonshine (called Arak) from the bride’s father’s basement still, and a barrage of Lebanese music. It was an incredibly fun party which ended promptly at midnight, and the only fault I can find with it is that there is a Lebanese tradition of stealing something from the bride’s house the night before the wedding…which nobody told me about until the next day, because there was an unguarded bike upstairs and I could have hauled off an ungodly amount of booty.

The next day we went further up the mountain to take some pictures while we were all dolled up. The bride was in a gigantic, hooped white dress and we were in our Blues Brothers suits. We posed together in various spots on a beautiful apple orchard dotted with Roman ruins in the distance that belonged to a family relation whose name nobody can remember because he looked so much like George Bush, which is exactly what we called him. Then the three of us in black went down to the church and shivered in front of it for an hour waiting for the bride. We did get to ring the big bells though.

Then began one of the most bizarre wedding tableaus I’d ever seen (not that I’ve been to that many) because the wedding and the

procession, from beginning to end was controlled entirely by the photographers. The bride arrived in her rented beamer and sat in the car for a few minutes while the video crew arranged us in the phalanx he thought best along a red carpet rolled down the stairs of the church. We waited for a while as the guys with video cameras got into place and the photographer was where he wanted to be and then went from the cold outside of the church to the cold inside of the church. My first surprise was seeing that the photographers had erected lighting right up against the altar, and they spent the entire service wandering around the altar taking pictures, even at one point tapping the priests on the shoulders to get them out of the way for better views.

As I am always terribly uncomfortable in churches the ceremony was thankfully short, and I escaped without blasphemy for a day. At one point the groom reached over to give something to the best man. What I thought was the ring turned out to be the key to the rental car, as they would be going to the reception in the fancy beamer.

The reception was somewhere between very cold and really cold slightly downhill from the church, I don’t know what the exact elevation was. The best man and I sat at a table with all the other foreigners, a couple of Canadians, a Swede, a Brit and his Thai wife, and two Scots. This group was mainly made up of Hash runners from Jeddah, and the Scots actually flew in just for the night of the wedding and flew out again. A bottle of mountain moonshine and a bottle of whiskey sat on every table, but the best man and I were not feeling so hot to start the liquor going. Some Lebanese mezze (little plates of food much like Spanish tapas) started going around the tables but the bride and groom where nowhere to be seen. They sat in the beamer in the parking lot for about an hour and none of us had any idea why.

Then pretty much without warning somebody appeared with little red hats (I still think they’re called a Fez) and all the foreign men were ushered out of the restaurant and asked to put them on and wait. The bride and groom came to join us, along with a cadre of Lebanese dancers, dressed in some kind of ritualistic uniforms, bearing drums and spears, in that order. The bride may have had some inkling of what was going on, but I think she was too cold to think about it. The leader of the white silk brigade simply said, “follow me,” and it was on. They pranced up the stairs and we followed behind them, and then there was overload.

The eight of us were gathered into a circle holding hands and badly dancing the dubke (a traditional Lebanese circular celebration dance…thing) the lights were coming from all angles, the music was roaring out of speakers three feet above our heads, and around our circle the white silken gentlemen were also dancing around and banging drums. Fountains of sparkling fireworks also sprang from the ground all around us making the room outside the circle invisible. None of us had any idea how it had happened or how long it would last. It was like the lost book of revelations written by Richard Simmons was coming to life all around us.

But after a few confusing minutes we were allowed to escape the circle and the dancers put on a fairly acrobatic show and were joined by some white silken lady dancers. It was a much more impressive spectacle from the outside looking in.

Then the Lebanese wedding guests sprang to the speakers like glamorous party moths to a strobe light. Before too long everybody stopped to eat, and we expats quickly fled back to the relative safety of our white people table. The spear and drum dancers cantered back off to their secret mountain lair and the dust settled over the restaurant. The bride and groom sat at their own table with about 40 pounds of food spread before them and we foreigners returned to our natural element, awkward small talk.

The bride’s brother started the festivities back up by singing a few Lebanese songs, and to his credit the guy had a great set of pipes, and after that the Lebanese broke free. Beirut is known as one of, if not THE party capital of the Middle East, and apparently their weddings aren’t much different from their clubs. I’ve always had a certain dread of weddings, the cheesiness, the awkwardness, and it seems like a place where there’s a very fine line between being a little tipsy and embarrassingly drunk in front of everyone you know. This wedding though was by far the most fun and exciting wedding I’ve ever been a part of.

The cousins and sisters and brothers were all out there shaking it, and then the aunts and uncles were all out there. It should be no surprise that I was the worst dancer among them, but they could all actually dance. This frenzy of dancing in which the middle age folk were keeping up, even surpassing the twenty-somethings lasted for a couple of hours I think. At one point there were people being lifted onto shoulders, including me for a bit, and then, like all parts of this story so far, something expected came out of nowhere, a fucking sword.

It was sitting in front of the cake when we walked in and then all of a sudden the groom had unsheathed it as he was draped in some kind of brown robe and the bride held the sheath. He was laughing and posing with it for a little while before the bride’s father grabbed the sheath and showing a degree of athleticism a 70 year old man shouldn’t even be capable of had a dancing sword fight with the groom, whose face quickly went from happy-go-lucky to “this shit just got real.”

Then there was some more frenzied dancing, followed by the “first dance” of the bride and groom, first surrounded by more fireworks, and then by a dry-ice machine that quickly turned the marble floor into a death trap. The groom then cut the cake, with what else but a sword, and then the obligatory tossing of the bouquet/garter followed that. Then there was some more dancing. The last surprise and maybe the biggest was how quickly the reception ended. I thought by the way the night had progressed that it would probably just continue going into the wee hours of the morning until people were collapsing and passing out all over the restaurant, but as furious as the party was, after the bride and groom left it simply stopped like someone had unplugged it, and everyone went home at an entirely reasonable hour.

The departure of the bride and groom would mark the last time I would see them until I got back to Saudi Arabia, they were whisked away the next day to Italy for their honeymoon. Though this raucous and entertaining Lebanese wedding was the first I’d been invited to, it wasn’t the first one I’d seen. That happened the year before sometime in September, on an entirely different mountain.

Northbound and Down: The Dead City of Madain Saleh

After being cooped up in the house for a little over a month, I decided I needed to get out of dodge for a weekend. There was a tour company located in Jeddah that arranged weekend trips within and outside of the city. I called them up and arranged to pay about 250 dollars for a bus ride out to Madain Saleh and its surrounding environs. Madain Saleh is a remarkably interesting historical relic in Saudi, almost more so for the way the Saudis have treated the site than for its significance in the region 1200 years ago, when it was built.

Before I got there however, there was a bus. It was Thursday morning (the weekend in Saudi is Thursday and Friday) and I was waiting at the gap between the nine foot high concrete abutments cheerfully adorned with spools of razor wire that marked the entrance to my compound. The bus arrived about thirty minutes after the pre-arranged time, meaning right on Saudi time. When the doors creaked open and I stepped onto the bus I was greeted by the owner of the tour company and what appeared like two dozen parentless children, but it was early and I was only half awake.

The bus barreled out of the slip road and onto the empty highway that led away, past the airport, to the North. The bus ride was going to take around eight hours to get where we needed to go. I relaxed into a front seat as the proprietor brought over a huge tray of Arab sweets and breakfast-like items. I ate a few and finished drinking a can of Mountain Dew before going into a coma.

A few hours later I woke up, and as is usually the case after a deep sleep in a public place, wiped whatever drool remained dangling from my chin. When I stretched out and surreptitiously took a look down toward the back of the bus I confirmed that it was populated entirely by children. They were remarkably well behaved so I assumed that they weren’t Saudi children, but as I would discover on the ride home, they were all simply asleep.

The lone adult on this field trip, a Saudi man wearing a traditional white thobe (well more normal here than traditional), was the owner of the tour company, and spoke very good English. This was a stroke of good luck as I still couldn’t speak Arabic. As we approached Medina (ye olde’ second Holiest city in Islam, which I am not allowed to enter) he began describing some of the more interesting things along the road side.

As it turns out the largest manufacturer of Korans in Saudi Arabia is located on the highway outside of Medina, “because they use the French printing method,” my tour guide explained. Living is Saudi Arabia long enough you begin to question your sense of irony, but the largest manufacturer of Holy Books in the birthplace of Islam was expelled from Medina because they found that the infidel method more efficiently spread the word of God.

Another nap later I woke up to fields of date palms rolling from the mountains toward the highway. “From Jordan,” my guide explained, “they are hybrids.” And by some botanical trick or other they brought the dates closer to the ground, so that the squat trees looked more like lines of brown and green sea urchins left in the sand after the waters had receded.

The farther north the bus barreled along the closer we came to the remnants of empire. Yellow pickets in long lines and immaculate Ottoman Blockhouses are the only reminders that the forces of the world touched this desert once, long ago. The Hejazz railway brought the Bedouin under closer scrutiny and tighter control from their Turkish sovereigns. The yellow poles are all that remain of the tracks though. The wood and spikes and steel rails had all been carted away in the last half century to be put to other purposes by the locals.

After any number of little naps, dirty truck-stop bathroom breaks, and disoriented glances at the monotonous landscape later we arrived at our first stop. We didn’t know what it was exactly, but we were happy to be somewhere. We parked next to a few idling trucks, and the colorful if somewhat dirty Pakistani truck drivers sitting in the shade wearing their Salwar Khamises. There was trucker debris everywhere, heaps of garbage covered in flies littered the dirt parking lot. We’d somehow managed to pick up an extra Saudi while I was asleep, and he was the local “expert” on Madain Saleh and its surrounds.

A hundred feet or so above the abysmal foreground of truck trash on the rock formations were what was believed to be “the oldest cave drawings in Saudi Arabia.” I have to say I’m impressed that the country has been making efforts lately to acknowledge and protect a lot of their pre-Islamic history, for a long time the rulers of the country didn’t want to admit that anything resembling culture or history existed before the Prophet. This site though, was not among their conservation efforts.

Our guide points out that “they didn’t write the date, so we have no idea how old they are,” but as you can see “here is a camel, and a man, and a woman and a goat,” he astutely continues, “the people in the drawing are very tall, so we think people used to be much taller here.” As a faux academic this was a pretty frustrating site. It’s an important piece of history not just for Saudi but potentially the entire Arab world, and there are no doubt similar drawings all over the Arabian Peninsula. This is what we have experts for, to study the unknown and help shed light on it by drawing from previous finds. There is a rule that for everything that exists there is some kind of porn of it on the internet. In the Academic world if something exists, no matter how short lived or obscure, someone has written an unreadable dissertation on it.

Unfortunately for the drawings here though, by the look of the Arabic graffiti beginning to overtake the carvings, they will all be gone before anyone knew when they were.

The next stop was genuinely interesting. A chain link fence blocked direct access to the large structure, but the façade of the 100 year old station from the old Hejazz railway was mostly intact, complete with Mosque, cisterns, and some kind of wind driven pumping apparatus. I also noticed for the first time that we had two cars full of Chinese people following us. I listened to them talk for a minute or two before I tuned into what language they were speaking before I could narrow it down to Mandarin.

“Where are you from?” I asked. (In Chinese, yeah, it’s one of the three phrases I can still pull off)

They looked at me for a full 30 seconds with their mouths open before responding…”China.”

Apparently they don’t get a whole lot of white guys speaking to them in Chinese in Saudi Arabia. They had joined the tour late, taking their own cars from KAUST (the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology) where they taught Engineering. Before long we were back in the bus again and off to the most interesting site of the day.

We stopped on a small hill overlooking green fields littered with date palms. Behind us are the mostly standing remnants of an abandoned mud walled city. I had been to a similar place in Oman, by accident, and it was an incredibly fun place to roam around. This particular city, populated by one of the tribes that left the dessert before Saudi Arabia was Saudi Arabia, was itself a defensive fortification, though a small fort was added to the mountain adjoining the homes below by the Turks. The city was designed in a pattern not unlike a Mandala, so that anyone attacking the town would simply get lost in the dense geometry of its construction while the defenders could move their livestock to the center of the town and form a defense. It became more and more ingenious as the minutes rolled on, and by myself I got incredibly lost. Eventually I aimed for the old Turkish fort on the hillside and somehow found a shortcut through the holes in the walls of crumbling houses.

While I wandered atop the fort getting a good glimpse of the old abandoned town, and in the distance its modern replacement, one of the little Saudi scamps started up a conversation. He wanted to know about Obama and America mostly. After a few minutes it became clear that he was a really bright kid, and spoke English near fluently. “You know what president Obama told the king?” He asked.

“Nope.” To be honest I just wanted to be left alone, but there weren’t any other white guys to pawn him off onto.

“He said Saudi Arabia has a weapon more powerful than the atomic bomb…they have the Jihad.” Now, despite the fact that I don’t think anyone calls it the atomic bomb anymore, and that any president would be committing political suicide publicly telling an Arab ruler that the Jihad at their disposal was more powerful than the American military, I didn’t hold it against him. Most Saudis are fiercely patriotic in my experience. With the exception of the many who have gone and studied abroad anyway.

Although one of my first weeks in Saudi Arabia I had a curious interaction with a twenty-something at the cell phone shop. I went in with an older coworker to pay for an internet connection. When we sat down he asked me, “When did you come to Saudi Arabia?”

“About a week ago.”

“These people are all fucking crazy. I don’t know why someone from America would come here, I want to leave as soon as I can, and go to America.”

Even my coworker, Bob, who had lived in Jeddah for more than 20 years, was completely taken aback by the guy’s directness in putting down his country. I don’t think it’s happened again in the year since actually. But anyway, where were we…

So the kid in the mud city, who was just about to enter high school, did finally start feeding me some interesting anecdotes about his family history. The scion of the family was apparently fabulously wealthy, and had ten sons to split his money. The boy’s father was one of the ten. His father and his nine brothers each received an ungodly amount of millions of dollars when they came of age. (he quoted something like 400 million, but who knows what it really was) They built massive homes, drove expensive cars, and spent years at a time in five star hotels in Europe, and in the end all nine brothers went completely bankrupt while the boy’s father wisely invested his money. Apparently all nine uncles now live completely on the largess of the boy’s father.

Now naturally one should be skeptical about the stories of a 12 year old boy, so back on the bus I asked our guide if he knew the family, and I was told simply that his father had “a lot of wasta.” Wasta is the Arabic word for “influence” and in a country run by a king, and a landscape full of oil, that usually translates to a rich fucking dude.

The kid, AbdulAziz, continued this tale as we wandered again through the town and while getting lost (again) and finally getting to the bus after everyone was seated and ready to go…to lunch. To which we returned to our surprisingly well apportioned hotel. After some passable kebabs and rice and salad, we were off again…to the Desert!

The bus rolled along, and then offroad for a bit, through a beautiful piece of sandy desert some 20 miles from Madain Saleh. We passed a number of rocks, there was Camel rock, baby camel rock, turtle rock, and eventually we got out at elephant rock, and watched the sun turn the world pink for a half hour. There is a quality to sunsets in the desert whose only parallel I can find in a snowstorm. It sounds odd, but the desert is essentially emptiness itself, and a hush seems to fall over every tourist when the sun begins painting it, in the same way the snow simply turns everything into emptiness and seems to induce the same silence.

At any rate it was beautiful, pictures were taken, Bedouin rode horseback into the sunset, and the bus roared back to life. Also worth noting, because part of me hopes it doesn’t become a trend, this was the first time I’d ever seen someone using an entire Ipad as the primary method of photographing his journey (one of the Chinese guys of course.)

The sun had set, it was getting dark, we’d been on the road all day, my brain was relatively fried; so what better place to take us next than a museum filled with relatively small text? Despite the atrocious degree of misleading propaganda and myth sold to the average Saudi I have found every museum in the magic kingdom to be surprisingly accurate and relevant. It’s almost like going to Washington D.C. for a Glen Beck Tea Party rally and then moving straight into the Smithsonian. It kindles a glimmer of hope.

The Madain Saleh museum had a lot of old maps (which I love) of the prevailing powers of the tribes, and the extent of the ancient Nabatean Kingdom (the guys who built Petra in Jordan). There were a number of archeological relics on display and a bunch of other stuffed which I’m ashamed to say I was just too tuned out to bother reading.

And like a lifetime movie, despite common sense and good taste, the tour continued. Our last stop of the day was a little date market, which despite everyone’s fatigue was pretty cool. There were five or six little date shops, which stocked a few dozen varieties of dates, none of which I could make any sense of. It was a lot like trying to buy rice in Japan, everything looked pretty much the same. But I knew Medina dates were some of the best in the business, so I just bought some of those.

The next day the tour of Madain Saleh actually arrived at Madain Saleh, which isn’t so much as a site as the remnants of an old city. There are over 100 tombs carved into the rock face in the now walled off and restricted piece of that desert, and while not nearly as imposing or well preserved as the old capital of the kingdom at Petra, was still a stark and beautiful remnant of one of the forgotten chapters of human history. Our magic school bus stopped at the first tomb and the tour guide, with a much better grasp of these sites than the cave drawings of yesterday, began his tour-guidery. I put in my Ipod.

In Petra the city was imposing. I walked in a valley beneath the tight spacing of hundred foot walls of rock closing in from both sides. In Madain Saleh I was struck by how small the tombs seemed in comparison to the expanse of the desert spreading beneath it beyond the horizon. We drove from groups of tombs to groups of tombs, we walked inside, took pictures, saw the cave paintings and dark holes in the Earth that once contained the decaying genetic history of an extinct civilization.

But it was not always this way. Madain Saleh for all its majesty as a tourist attraction was not cordoned off and sanitized for hundreds of years. It was abandoned and left alone, vanishing in plain sight and reduced to the bedtime boogey man of the nearby towns and tribes. Even twenty or thirty years ago the expats who drove off-road for hours in their jeeps with maps would find the bones of the long dead littering the tombs, sometimes crunching under their boots. The place was said to be cursed and inhabited by Djinns, the wild demons of the desert that infected the living like a parasite and drove them mad. Fear, naked and illogical, sometimes remains the most ardent preserver of history.

In the midst of all the tombs we stopped at another partially reconstructed Hejazz railway station. This one though had been remade to look new, with benches and lampposts dotting the newly built platforms above the slowly expanding rails. One of the last functioning trains of the railroad was hidden inside a locked building, which, to our disappointment, was closed on Fridays. It all had a very disneyesque feel to it. It was a good effort, and probably would pay dividends if they ever completed it, but when surrounded with so much genuine, untouched history why bother with crude restorations? It was like leaving a Vegas magic show to play three card Monte in the alley outside.

After we left the station the bus rambled past a rock that looked like a face. Go tourists go!

And then we came upon one of the most famous images in Saudi Arabia (besides Mekka and Medina anyway). The tomb of one of Madain Saleh’s governors was an absolutely majestic site. The egg shaped mass of rock sits in the sand completely apart from any other geological structures. We didn’t bother to climb inside this one because the inside would have looked much the same as the dozens of other tombs we’d clambered through during the day, but our tour guide earned his tip here. When everyone had gotten on the bus and I wanted to get one last picture he climbed up with me and got down on his knees in the sand to take my picture in front of it. I didn’t really want my picture in front of it but I wasn’t about to turn down a guy who was willing to get his robe all dirty for me.

And like this re-telling the day continued on long past a sensible ending. We had one last stop before we exited the grounds. There was a large room carved into a pretty set of mountains, which I skipped by because the urge to climb was on. This was probably the highest point in or near Madain Saleh and it commanded some purdy views. As I reached the top I saw a bunch of the Chinese dudes pointing at me and before long the guy with the Ipad was standing next to me taking pictures into the sun. We’d lost sight of all the Arabs though. They had all crept through a crevice and into a cave to look at some carvings. There were the obligatory undated carvings in Arabic with the usual praises of Allah and his Prophet Mohammed ((Peace be upon him)in case the religious police are reading) which prompted our guide to suggest that the race that dwelled here 400 years before the birth of Mohammed had managed to convert to his as of yet unspoken religion. Another set of carvings which pre-dated the Arabic script were left agonizingly undeciphered, but were still pretty cool looking.

The earliest carvings were about twenty feet above us, “because the people here were at least 8 meters tall,” said the tour company proprietor.

“Wait, what? You don’t mean that do you?”

“Yes, of course they were that tall. It’s not hard to believe, because Adam (of garden of Eden fame) was thirty meters tall.”

“Adam? Was thirty meters tall? You can’t really believe that.”

“Why?” He honestly asked me why I didn’t believe that the supposed Biblical progenitor of the human race was 90 feet tall. He had a perplexed look on his face like this was an established fact.

This is turn left me somewhat perplexed as I didn’t even know how to respond. So he simply continued trying to convince me.

“Yes that is how he and Eve (of the fall of the race of man fame) traveled so quickly across the world.”

Jeddah, the city I live in, means ‘grandmother’ in Arabic. And the name is supposedly a reference to the fact that Ole’ Eve died and was buried there. Presumably by Adam? Who knows? But he continued to explain after this factoid that Adam died somewhere in India, and I’m sure we’ll find a human skull the size of a Volkswagon there sometime soon.

I’ve heard any number of these mythological/religious kinds of statements in my time here. And many of them leave me in the same bewildered position of simply accepting what they say with a shrug and a headshake because I can’t even begin to fathom how these beliefs took root in the first place. It feels like trying to explain cosmology through interpretive dance. (though I admit when artsy hippies put their minds to it, they think they can explain everything through interpretive dance)

From what I’ve gleaned in my short time darting across the Islamic world I’ve noticed that Islam has perhaps the most convenient mythology of the world’s major religions. It came quite a bit later, almost as if it was caulked between the inconsistencies of the others, completing a system of worship and an utter departure from reality. It is important to know that in the Islamic gradient the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia often strays for more toward the extreme and fundamental than almost all the others, with the possible exception these days of Pakistan. It is no small coincidence that so many of the religious schools in Pakistan are chartered by briefcases full of money and a Saudi patron.

But enough of that, the bus left and we had an unbearably long ride back full of now screaming Saudi children. I’ll spare you the details as anyone who’s gotten this far has already suffered enough. I did notice as we passed the Marquis sign of a Bank of Riyadh that at 7:19 about an hour after sunset that the temperature registered 39 degrees Celsius. So riding along through the darkness, the air hovered around 102 degrees. Soon after that we ate some food at a gas station restaurant and the bus purred on back to Jeddah.

As I sit here writing this at a seaside coffee shop, way too long after the fact, it is Saudi National day, and I am watching the locals celebrate the nation’s founding/independence in their beloved suicidal way. Three kids stood atop a slow moving hummer waving enormous Saudi flags while slowing traffic to a snarl behind them, though most of the traffic behind them consisted of other dudes of varying age either sitting in the open windows or out the sunroofs of their cars waving flags and honking as well. It is not called the Magic Kingdom for nothing.