Day 13: Latakia/Tripoli, Lebanon - "You want to come in?!"

So I wake up in my tent. The roof of the tent is about three inches from my face, sagging under the weight of something. All the interior walls are wet. To my right are the feet of a small Polish man who is still asleep. You may ask youself: How did I get here?

Well, the previous evening, Amir and I got to Latakia at around 19:00 and hopped in a cab to the Safwan Hotel which is run by a friend of Ahmad's, a guy named Mohammed. Mohammed is famous throughout traveller circles for his obsession with Tintin. He is also a really nice guy with a habit of cracking terrible jokes and then sniggering childishly afterwards. I loved him immediately. He was standing outside the hotel as our cab pulled up. We dumped our bags on the pavement.

"Are you coming?" he asked.

Amir and I looked at each other, perplexed.

"Where?" we replied.

Mohammed explained that every month or two, a group of hikers and campers from all over Syria go by bus into the mountains somewhere, camp out for a night or two and hike during the day. He had waited for us to arrive and wanted to know if we would be coming with him. We of course said yes.

We went to the restaurant on the corner and inhaled a good, if slow-to-arrive, meal. Then we jumped in a cab with Mohammed and a Polish guy named Bartek and went to meet the bus that would take us to a hitherto undisclosed location somewhere in the Syrian mountains. The bus was a rumbling belching old hunk of junk and the ride was lots of fun, being it that there were more passengers than seats and everyone was crawling over each other, lying down in the aisles and generally carrying on in the fashion that Syrians are wont to do.

We arrived at the site, an abandoned monastery about 50km east of Latakia. The place was rammed. It was raining. We walked from room to room, only to find that every available space was taken. I mean every space. All the floors, behind doors, even the stone patios were masked by pitched tents. There was nowhere to set up my sleeping bag, let alone put up my tent. Mohammed showed us to the "club" room, a big empty space with a bare concrete floor. A PA and decks were set up at one end. People stood around talking and smoking, waiting for the music to start.

"We will sleep here," Mohammed said.

My heart sank. The floor was covered in mud and water and of course, there woudl be music until god-knows-when. Amir was already chatting happily to a Syrian girl and Mohammed was waving to old friends. I motioned to Bartek.

"This is bullshit," I said.

"I know," said Bartek. "We'll never get to sleep."

We walked down a long flight of steps to a patch of gorund underneath two trees. It was still raining. The ground was less wet than in the "club". Bartek and I laid out the groundsheet and pitched my tent. Then we dumped our stuff and went back to the club, where the music had just begun.

Never in a million years would I have suspected that mid-May 2008 would find me in the middle of the Syrian mountains, dancing to Arabic pop music and house remixes of 70s disco tracks, surrounded by a heaving mass of shouting, sweating, exuberant Syrians. It was insane. The music was ridiculously loud, the music wavered continuously between painfully bad, really silly or hilariously funny. I worked my Middle Eastern dance moves, shaking my chest and shoulders, pointing my fingers and wiggling my hips. I was a hit. The Syrians were loving it. They cheered, clapped and eventually invited me to join in a traditional Syrian dance which involves holding hands and hopping around in a circle from one foot to the other. It's hard to describe the abandon with which these people danced. Outside, the wind was shrieking and the rain was lashing against the buildings, but inside was rave-tastic.

I got exhausted after a few hours. Bartek and I repaired to the tent, where we chatted for a while, formulated an informal plan to go to Lebanon together and then fell asleep. Then I woke up in the tent with the roof sagging almost onto my face. It had snowed during the night. Snow covered my tent and had soaked through the nylon. Nothing like quality craftsmanship. The rain was hammering down. I did not like the idea of hiking in this weather. Neither did Bartek. We clambered out of the tent, folded it up in record time and made for the "club", where Amir and Mohammed were waiting for us. The hiking for the day had been cancelled. We piled into a minibus and went back to Latakia.

Back at the hotel, I opened the tent on the roof and left it to dry. Mohammed and his crazy uncle, whose English vocabulary consists of shouting Mohammed's name over and over at increasing volumes, were glued to the TV. There was fighting in Beirut. It looked pretty bad. Hezbollah, or, as I would begin calling them in Lebanon, the Hez, had taken over the airport and most of the city centre. The border with Damascus was shut. Transport was being curtailed. Amir took one look at the situation and told me he was out. Bartek and I, on the other hand, thought that this would be an ideal time to visit Lebanon. I halved my gear, leaving most of the weight and clothing at Mohammed's hotel. Bartek and I jumped in a taxi. It cost us 500 Syrian pounds each (7 euros) to get a service taxi from Latakia to Tripoli in Lebanon.

Crossing the border was an intense experience. As we approached the border, we saw more and more people walking in the other direction, like a mass migration. Most of them had no luggage, just a bin bag or burlap sack of stuff. One guy was carrying only a television. These, the driver explained, were Syrian workers who were leaving Lebanon until the trouble blew over. Our driver, who insisted on being called Mike even though his named was Mohammed, wore sunglasses that he never removed and drove a Buick Park Avenue. He had lived in Vancouver for eleven years and loved American cars. I asked Mike what he thought about the situation in Lebanon.

"I am for my family and my God. Fuck all," he answered.

What about America?

"Fucking Bush...Bush sharmuta," Mike spat. "But I love the cars."

After leaving Syria, we drove to the Lebanese border office. It was bedlam. There were hundreds of people clamouring to be let past the chain so that they could leave. The entry hall was completely deserted. I filled in the form and handed it to the border guard.

"Your job?" he asked.

"Technician," I said. It's the most innocuous definition of something I do for money that is still technically not lying.

The guard looked at my form, then at my passport, then at my face. He gestured to the baying mob outside and to the empty entry hall.

"You want to come in?!" he asked incredulously.

I nodded eagerly. He stared at me as if I had five noses for a moment and then gave me back my passport.

"Welcome to Lebanon," the guard said, waving me towards the exit. On my way out I could have sworn I heard him call me an idiot.

We piled back into Mike's Buick and entered Lebanon. The coastal road that winds from the border to the centre of Tripoli is beautiful, overlooking mountains to the left and the sparkling Mediterranean to the right. The sea view is broken occasionally by ingenious shacks made from all manner of material, built by the homeless. Cardboard boxes, sheet metal, jerry cans, plastic bags, everything that is tossed away is put to use to make their houses.

The road was littered with the remains of some burnt tires and piles of branches and grass, left there to block the road the previous evening and that morning. We passed through several checkpoints, all of which are routine for that area of Lebanon and not because of the current situation. Mike pointed to a skeletal array of broken and bombed-out buildings. They jutted out of the wasteland that separated the highway from the sea. Some buildings were reduced to dust, others had the odd finger of concrete stubbornly sticking out. Others remained as they were but with all the walls missing, looking like the blueprints of houses rather than houses themselves. The ruins were made even uglier by the beauty of the seascape behind them. These were the remains of the Nahr-el-Bared refugee camp. Two days later I would learn more about the fate of the camp and the people who lived there. Passing by in the car, Mike would only explain that the camp was bombed by Saad al-Hariri's troops last year because the Saudi-funded Fatah-al-Islam group had taken up residence there, hiding among the Palestinian refugees. It was one of the worst instances of military action against the Palestinians but had gone largely unreported in the international press. Now the only legacy of the camp is the plethora of checkpoints that separate it from Tripoli proper.

We arrived in the centre of Tripoli to see armoured cars and tanks everywhere. Troops were deployed on every corner for several blocks in each direction. Thirty minutes before we arrived, shots had been fired, allegedly at the police. The army had responded by deploying in the centre of the town. All the shops were closed. People stood on corners, on pavements, even in the road, watching the troop movements and occasionally talking into mobile phones. Bartek and I looked at each other. It had spread from Beirut pretty fast. There was a palpable tension in the air, a feeling not of threat but rather of uncertainty, as if violence could explode from nothing at any minute. Over the next few days that I spent in Tripoli, that feeling disappeared quite rapidly, although whether as a result of less tension or just of me getting used to the situation I can't say.

The Buick's alternator gave out just as we parked. Mike swore and kicked the car a few times and then took us to the main square. After asking around, one guy showed us where our hotel was. The Pension Haddad, run by the family Haddad, is a lovely apartment with several rooms with two or three beds in each. For $7 a night I had hot water, free chai and a very familial atmosphere. On their business card, it says "Miss your Grandma?". Grandma Haddad was an incredible old crone, bent double with a hunched back and a weary, wrinkled face. Her back was so torturously pretzeled that I once saw her scrubbing the floor without actually bending over. I'm not kidding.

The common room in the pension was populated by a British guy with a broken shoulder fearfully waiting out his last day and a Danish guy who worked for the Danish Foreign Office in Jerusalem. The Dane, Phil, told us about what Beirut was like before he got out. He had arrived in Tripoli from Beirut that day. He had been walking to a bus stop and fighting had erupted around him. From what he told me, and what seemed to be common to everyone's accounts, the Hez were not in any way threatening to foreigners or even aggressive. Whenever someone I spoke to had been in the wrong place, the Hez had courteously moved them on and warned them to avoid the area. One Hezbollah gunman had even walked a couple I met to their hotel just to make sure they got there safely. Another backpacker, an American Jew, had been hitching in Lebanon and been picked up by three Hezbollah fighters. As they talked and found out he was American and Jewish, they were at pains to explain that they had a problem with the American government, not the American people, and that their fight was with Israelis, not Jews. How representative of the actual Hezbollah party line that is I do not know, but it was a common theme that the Hez made a clear distinction between what they consider the Zionist enemy and other people who simply share the same religion. When I was to talk with some of them later, in Baalbek, I received the same impression.

Bartek and I went out in search of food. We saw a crowd gathered outside a bank. A large black Mercedes was parked there. Militiamen in olive green vests carrying M16s stood guard on both sides of the street. The crowd surged forward as someone got into the car and then, as the Mercedes left, the crowd dispersed. Ahmad, our host at the Pension Haddad, told us that the guy in the car was the leader of the local militia. Tripoli is predominantly a Sunni city. They are supporters of Hariri, not of the Hez.

After eating, Bartek and I went for a walk through the old town, the abandoned souk and around the river up to the Citadel, an old fortified castle that stands proudly looking out over the hillside neighbourhoods. Tripoli was quiet. The air was still. An occasional motorbike would whizz past and the rider would wave a muted hello. After soaking up the views and both agreeing on the feeling of walking on eggshells, Bartek and I returned to the pension and went to bed.