Beirut as a holiday destination

[genghis61]

Lebanon: so hot right now
July 7, 2010

Two years ago, Lebanon was reeling from a crisis which brought gun battles onto the streets of Beirut, forced its airport to shut, and threatened to pitch the tiny Mediterranean country back into civil war.

Fastforward to 2010: Soaring economic growth, relative calm on its southern border with Israel and a truce between rival politicians have given crisis-ridden Lebanon a window of stability which it is translating into a tourist boom.

So hot right now ... Lebanon's beaches are brimming with bikini-clad, tanned women

Tourism Minister Fadi Abboud said he expects 2.2 million tourists to visit this year, up 25 per cent from last year's record, when the sector contributed a quarter of GDP.

Already Arab Gulf tourists fill the capital's five-star hotels, their gas-guzzling Hummers choke Beirut's narrow streets and their Asian staff struggle to carry dozens of shopping bags emblazoned with the names of top international brands.

Beaches brim with bikini-clad, tanned women and come nighttime, clubs host Europe's top DJs who play to audiences of thousands, many of whom are flush with cash from jobs abroad and are happy to spend hundreds of dollars on food, drink and music.

Forty per cent of this year's tourists are expected to be Arabs, another 40 per cent Europeans and the rest from other parts of the world.

"People are in love with this country," Abboud said in an interview last week. "I'm expecting a very, very good summer. Probably the best in our history."

The ever-present threat of war with Israel, which waged a 34-day conflict against Lebanon's Hezbollah in 2006, does little to dent Abboud's enthusiasm. "Certainly, security is very, very important but even after the war, the day the war finished, people started coming back again," he said.

Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri's government has also pledged to implement reforms, from privatisation to slashing debt, and the IMF predicts another year of economic growth of 8 percent.

"BRAND LEBANON"

Lebanon's resilience and ability to rebound from crises is what encourages many people to visit and spurs investors to pour millions of dollars in real estate projects, one of the country's biggest money-making sectors.

Just a week after feuding Lebanese leaders sealed a political deal in 2008 to end 18 months of conflict, restaurants had re-opened, hotel bookings soared and tourists replaced gunmen on the streets of Beirut.

Now its skyline is dotted with cranes working to build multi-million dollar skyscrapers and five-star hotels.

The influx of cash is also apparent in lavish schemes. For $250 per person, a crane will lift you and 21 others 50 metres above ground to enjoy dinner while taking in Beirut's sights. Just want to watch the sunset? That'll be $120.

Gordon Campbell Gray, who opened the luxury Le Gray hotel in Beirut's downtown Solidere district late last year, said his occupancy rate was well above 90 percent.

"Since the day we opened, we've been absolutely packed," he said at an economic conference.

When he decided four years ago to open the hotel "everyone thought I was crazy, but it's really spectacular. It ended up being one of the busiest hotels in our portfolio," he said, adding he was building a beach resort south of Beirut and considering another project in the mountains.

His hotel, with a rooftop swimming pool, a cigar bar and espresso machines in the 87-room, yellow-stoned structure, is attracting first-time visitors from Europe.

Asked why they would still come and pay $400 a night for a deluxe room when Europe is suffering from a financial crisis and falling euro, Gray says:

"Brand Lebanon -- the people, the resilience of the Lebanese people ... They have a spirit, unique which I know has come out of their history."

"GROWING LIKE MUSHROOMS"

Glitz, glamour and decadent riches aside, Tourism Minister Abboud is quick to point out that he wants to change the image that Lebanon is "the country of only millionaire tourists".

Lebanon boasts spectacular sights where hundreds of dollars need not be spent -- including mountain trails, the subterranean lakes and caves at Jeitta grotto and the Roman ruins of Baalbek.

While many restaurants charge top dollar, hundreds of more modest outlets offer Lebanon's famed mezze, or small dishes of salads, dips and raw meat.

"They (restaurants) are growing like mushrooms, by the end of this summer there'll be 8,000," from last year's estimate of 7,000, Abboud said. There are also 10 international music festivals and about 100 local ones, mostly in the open air.

Even renewed tensions after Israel accused Syria of supplying Hezbollah guerrillas with long-range Scud missiles have failed to dent the optimism.

Abboud's peeves at the moment are that Beirut's airport is not a smoke-free zone, weeds grow along the runway, and taxi drivers try to extort exorbitant prices from passengers.

As for a war? The only one Lebanon has been fighting with Israel in recent months is what has come to be known as the "hummous wars" -- with each country vying to hold the record for the biggest plate of hummous ever created.

A month ago, Lebanon triumphed with a 10 tonne plate of hummous. But as in other recent battles between the two hostile neighbours, an Israeli retaliation cannot be ruled out.

Reuters

[genghis61]

Middle East meets West
September 25, 2010

Patching up ... visitors enjoy the swimming pool of Beirut's bombed landmark Saint-Georges hotel.

It's dubbed the Middle East's sin city. Pretentious, volatile and cosmopolitan, Beirut has been ravaged by war and flooded with refugees but still it thrives.

Now, after 25 years of intermittent war between internal factions and neighbouring countries, Beirut is patching up its battle scars and trying to reclaim its old label as the Paris of the East. The city is in the middle of a construction boom, with whole neighbourhoods being rebuilt. Two slick new hotels - the long-anticipated Le Gray and the Four Seasons - have opened in the past year and a bevy of new bars and restaurants is injecting energy to the city's already hedonistic nightlife.

'We go out every night' ... Beirut has been dubbed the Middle East's sin city.

"When Gordon [Campbell Gray] first decided to open a hotel here, people thought he was totally crazy," says the Canadian general manager of Le Gray, Hector de Galard. We're sitting on the top floor of the hotel, with views across the central city and Martyrs Square, Beirut's Ground Zero. "At the time, Martyrs Square was filled with barricades and war tanks. But Gordon thought that Beirut had a spirit with such huge potential to reinvent itself, he wanted a hotel in this vision."

This latest addition to the CampbellGray Hotels group, which includes One Aldwych in London and Carlisle Bay in Antigua, is a boxy 87-room tower designed by Australian architect Kevin Dash and opened in October last year. It's been a long time coming; construction has paused intermittently, including in 2006 when neighbouring Israel started dropping bombs on southern Beirut.

From the top floor of Le Gray I look down upon Martyrs Square. I can see the northern end of the infamous Green Line, which just a few years ago cut the city in two, with Muslims in the west and Christians in the east. This part of the line is now a car park. On its far edge, lapped by the Mediterranean, are recent excavations that reveal ruins dating back to the Bronze Age, beneath ruins from the Roman era.

Some of these ruins are now disappearing under footings for a new apartment block, one of many changing the character of the downtown district. In the 1960s this bustling district, filled with graceful Ottoman-style buildings, was one of the most fashionable in the Mediterranean. Razed during the civil war, it is now being rebuilt according to the vision of the late prime minister, Rafiq Hariri, who was murdered in 2005. The grand cookie-cut buildings house designer-label shops and people-watching cafes, remarkably similar to faux-European districts appearing in Gulf cities, from where I'm told much of the funding for downtown is coming.

The streets fanning off downtown are a jumble of cranes and construction sites. A new marina and clubhouse flank the corniche. Half-built hotels compete for air space: a Grand Hyatt, a Kempinski, even a purported "10-star" hotel. The city's main Jewish synagogue, Maghen Abraham, is slowly being restored among surrounding construction sites. Built in the early 1900s by the then sizeable Jewish community, it was reportedly protected by the Palestine Liberation Organisation during the 1975-76 fighting and then, according to the Associated Press, all but razed by Israeli shelling.

Rising above it all is the war-ravaged shell of the Holiday Inn. Too big to be destroyed without taking down neighbouring buildings, the former hotel is a painful reminder of the past and a reminder of what to avoid in the future.

"There is a lot of expectation for the future at the moment," says Steve Chahwah, the down-to-earth German-Lebanese owner of Joe Pena's Cantina y Bar in Gemmayzeh, an inner-city neighbourhood containing a rare collection of intact 19th-century apartment buildings at the heart of Beirut's modish nightlife. "But Beirut is still quite a risky investment. The city has charisma. It is the Promised Land; people have been fighting over it for thousands of years. Today is peaceful but there is a chance war could break out again tomorrow."

On a Tuesday night, his Spanish-styled Mexican tapas bar and restaurant is almost bursting at the seams. "Beirutis like to live large and have fun," Chahwah says. "Even when the last spurt of fighting broke out, people just moved to a quieter neighbourhood to party. You can sit in a cave for a month but after a year you just think, f--- it, life must go on!"

Perhaps it's this air of uncertainty, teamed with the supercharged Lebanese character and love of excess, that makes Beirut so edgy and hip. Later that night I take a stroll through Gemmayzeh. The neighbourhood mood is jovial, full of bright young things drinking and flirting. It feels like a European city - until I get to the end of the neon-lit strip and see groups of soldiers with assault rifles.

Despite the obvious presence of the army, the city seems remarkably safe. Women walk the streets alone at night; many people leave their cars unlocked. In fact, the scariest thing is trying to cross the street. Lebanese drive like they spend money - recklessly.

"Lebanese people overdo everything," says Lama Matta, of Mayrig, an Armenian restaurant often named as one of the city's best places to eat. "This is the second-leading country in the world for plastic surgery. We go out every night. We drink every night. We spend, spend, spend. People say it's because of the war but really it's been like this forever."

Glamorous new bars and restaurants are everywhere and, I'm told, usually close just as fast as they open. The more pretentious, the longer the waiting list for a table. French bistro Couqley, which opened in November, flies its produce from France. An even newer 36-seat designer diner named Burgundy, housed in a faux-Provencal building in inner-city Saifi Village, matches minute portions of French-inspired cuisine (foie gras with quince terrine, confit duck and potato pearls) with extraordinarily priced Burgundy wine.

In contrast, the three best meals I have in my five-day city visit are also the cheapest: exceptionally fresh tabbouleh, hummus and lamb kebab at Le Chef, a scruffy little workers' cafe in Gemmayzeh; a smorgasbord of western Armenian delicacies at Mayrig; and Lebanese village food at Tawlet.

Beirut is a city of contrasts: of refugees and brazen snobbery, poverty beside ostentatious wealth, sectarian liberalism coexisting uneasily with fundamentalism. This is a city where you can swim in the morning and ski in afternoon. You can party non-stop from night until noon, then have brunch in Hezbollah territory.

Removed from the bars, nightclubs and restaurants, where bottles of champagne cost $10,000 and are served with sparklers so everyone can eye the purchase, is the palm-fringed corniche. This is where a true cross-section of the city comes to promenade and relax: men smoking nargileh, women wearing hijabs, power-walkers in designer gear, grandfathers fishing with grandchildren and teenagers on bicycles. It inspires a feeling captured in the words of Beatles guitarist George Harrison, posted on the wall of the Hard Rock Cafe overlooking the corniche: "The time will come when you see we are all one."

A city's kitchen table

WHILE a flurry of new bars and restaurants is reinventing Beirut's party scene, an organic farmers' market in a car park represents its culinary awakening. Every Saturday morning in Saifi Village the Souk el Tayeb, started six years ago by the charismatic Kamal Mouzawak, unites people from diverse regions and religions with a single purpose: to promote sustainably grown food.

The son of a farmer, Mouzawak searched Lebanon's fertile countryside for traditional produce and recipes that had fallen into obscurity. He started the souk with 10 producers — there are now more than 100 farmers selling olive oil, goat's cheeses, wild flowers, bread, wine, honey and more. "It's about building a national identity, bringing people from different backgrounds and religions together while supplementing incomes for small producers," he says.

The success of the souk spawned Mouzawak's tiny self-service diner named Tawlet. Behind a row of bullet-marked buildings and shops selling car parts, Tawlet, which means "kitchen table" in Arabic, seems an unlikely contender for Beirut's hottest table. Each day one of the producers from the souk runs Tawlet's kitchen, turning out a buffet of dishes native to their region.

In the kitchen today is Suzanne Doveihi from the village of Zgharta, famed for its kibbe, a Levantine specialty of finely minced meat blended with buckwheat. She prepares kibbe labneh, a buckwheat cake stuffed with goat's cheese, a buttery raw lamb dish called kibbeneye and wild boar served with stewed apples, prunes and mash.

"There are so many amazing recipes and products in Lebanon that have almost disappeared," Mouzawak says.

"We didn't want to put them into a book or a museum but keep them alive in a kitchen where people can share. Food is the most important medium to perpetrate tradition and build a national identity."

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Warning

The Australian government advises travellers to reconsider their need to travel to Lebanon because of its "unpredictable security and political" situation; for updates see smartraveller.gov.au

[The Muffinman]

Holiday in Lebanon?

Fuck that!

Having dealt with plenty of these nutbag fuckwits in Australia I'd rather take a trip to India. And that's saying something!