“It's a traffic light,” I say although it’s somewhat self-explanatory. “You’re not stopping, are you?” says Anna. “Oh don’t be so ridiculous! As if anyone’s going to pay any attention to that!”
She has a point. We lived in Beirut for eight months back in 1995, a time when there were not only no traffic lights, there were also no road signs, no speed limits, no traffic police, and, indeed no apparent traffic laws. None.
Our friend Khaled’s means of negotiating jams was to take his gun out of his glove compartment, strap it to his under-arm, and if the traffic was really bad, wave it around a bit.
As it turns out, the lights are a mixed success: some people stop, some people don’t. A very Lebanese solution. You can do what you want, but you may have a super-charged Lebanese yuppie ram you in the back. Ah, yes, the memories come flooding back. It’s that signature Beirut cocktail of adventure and excitement — with just a hint of sudden death.
Fourteen years ago, Anna and I wrote the first post-civil-war guidebook to Lebanon. I don’t think either of us have felt the same about anywhere since: Beirut looms over our lives like ... well, like the kind of psychotic ex-lover who you worry might strangle you in your sleep.
But it’s thrilling to be back. We cruise along the seafront Corniche, and around the reconstructed downtown. On Martyrs’ Square, Beirut’s ground zero, the southernmost point of the old Green Line that divided Muslim West Beirut from Christian East Beirut, we reel at the sight of a Virgin Megastore and practically faint when we see a Dunkin’ Donuts. Although — thank God! — the hulking Holiday Inn with its bullet holes and bomb craters is still there, as derelict and abandoned as ever.
It’s beautiful, Beirut, beautiful and ugly and pock-marked and damaged and glamorous and unstable and exciting and just a bit mentally unhinged. It’s the Elizabeth Taylor of the Mediterranean. Or it would be if you replaced the words “alcohol” with “Israel” and “a string of unsuitable marriages” with “15 years of civil war.”
And like a hardened celebrity hack, I’ve learned the hard way not to be taken in by its appearance. Because Beirut is back. Again. It’s having a moment. Another one. There are two spanking new hotels — Le Gray, a sister hotel to the feted One Aldwych in London and Carlisle Bay in Antigua, has just opened; and that seal of international luxury approval, a Four Seasons, is opening soon. What’s more, this year the New York Times nominated it its number one destination in the world.
Yadda, yadda yadda. Talk to the hand ... I’ve spent the past 14 years telling people how great Lebanon is. How vast the mountains and sublime the food and empty the ruins and friendly the people and cool the bars. And periodically they’ve even believed me. And then news breaks out. There’s always too much news in Lebanon: 2005 when prime minister Rafik Hariri got blown up by a car bomb; 2006 when Israel subjected the country to a month-long bombardment, blowing up the airport, highways, bridges, electricity sub-stations, and killing some 1,000 or so people; winter 2008, when Hezbollah gunmen took to the streets.
Could reports of a new dawn really be true this time? I hope so, I really do, but I worry that I’ll jinx it somehow. I said the same when our guide came out in 1996, when we did a new edition in 1998, and when I returned to see the south after the Israelis pulled out in 2000.
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