Pathways

We recross the Lebanon Range one night in the dark, Google confidently routing us along a different road than we had taken that same morning, in daylight. On the map the estimated time is the same, so we shrug and agree. 

In the light cast by the car's headlights we watch as the streetlights peter out and then give way to darkness, then as the road narrows from two lanes to one, then narrows further. 

"Should we turn around?" I ask. 

We pass small tents of scrap plastic, huddles of sheep. Three women have set a pot on the road and are cooking dinner there. They all turn to look at us as we pass. 

Then the road is not really a road any more. In parts, it looks chewed up, asphalt lying on the verge in great chunks. In other places, the road simply drops off into nothing, and a new path has been worn inland, away from the edge.

Our phone reception is coming and going. I message our friend our location. Just in case you don't hear from us, I say, half-joking.

Shit, she messages. Bad road.

Bad quality? I message back. Or bad idea?

It takes us another hour, bumping over rough grade and pot holes, past more small settlements, until we find ourselves back on a surfaced road.

"Fucking Google Maps," my friend says, when we finally arrive.

"Fucking Google maps," we agree.

*

Part of the problem is alphabetic.

I had encountered this before in Syria, and in Yemen. Because there is no standardised method for Romanising Arabic names, a town named بيت الدين might be written Beit ed-Dine in one report, Beteddine in another; Btaddine by a colleague who lives there. If someone tells you to see so-and-so, in such-and-such a place, a person can lose their wits trying to spell out an approximation that Google Maps might recognise.

Another part of the problem is that naming is never a neutral act. 

When asked in the Chouf Valley (see also: Shouf, or Shuf, or Chuf) where we are going next, we say Sidoun, and receive only blank looks. See-doon? we try. Saidon? Oh, Saida! they say, enlightenment dawning. Yes, yes, very nice. An Arabic name, or an older Greek (or even Phoenician) one - who uses which depends on where you are and which history you identify with. 

But, mainly, the problem is that the Lebanon contained within the tidy universe of the map does not look anything like Lebanon in reality. 

*

When we retrace the same mountain pass during daylight, we see more clearly the sections where the road simply seems to have crumbled or been carved away. The landscape below is rocky, arid and steep. It is beautiful. But it is no more a road than many of the hiking trails we have walked on foot.

This pass between Aintoura and Zahlé may have been purposely destroyed - in an attempt to contain Hezbollah - or simply abandoned to neglect when the country's financial system collapsed, taking municipal and district funds with it. 

There are sheep. Dogs. At one point a shepherd passes us, mounted on a pony that picks its way carefully along the stony ridge.

He waves at us, and we wave back. It is hard to see what his flock can survive on, up here in the great rocky nothing.

*

On our first day in the country, we take a broad road running parallel to the coastal highway. Google is certain we can use it. Along one particular stretch, we notice almost too late that all the covers of the carefully-spaced drains in the far-right lane have been taken, and only narrowly avoid breaking an axel in the exposed holes. 

What if that was in the dark? I ask, when we have righted ourselves. We stick to the middle of the road after that.

Later, when we are back on a larger road, S says, "Look. Progress."

Someone has helpfully put old tyres in these holes. 

*

In Sur - or Tyre, or Tyros - we try to locate the Roman Hippodrome at the centre of the old town, easily its most recognisable landmark. Google sends us down impassable alleys, streets abruptly truncated by concrete roadblocks, streets that narrow inexorably until we need to reverse all the way back out, various men and children shouting well-meant instructions in a language we don't speak. 

Some of the roadblocks have letters on them, weathered almost to invisibility. But on the road in we had passed checkpoints stenciled with the same word: UNAFIL. (Some, very peculiarly, with the addendum: Peace for Lebanon! Glory for Korean people!)

"There's still a peacekeeping force here?" I had asked, confused, and reached for my phone. This is before the 7th of October, and all of the ways in which UNAFIL would soon be in the headlines again. "The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon. Since... oh."

"What?" asked S.

"1978," I said. "Not very interim, any more."

We change tactics now and try instead to locate the Christian Quarter, a charming section of the old fishing port that appears in every traveler's Instagram posts of Tyre. There are no results in our map for any configuration of spelling. We park the car and try on foot, hailing friendly pedestrians and shop owners, who look at the bird's-eye view of their city on our screen and just shake their heads, sadly. Where did you say you want to go? 

The Christian Quarter, apparently, though we never found it. (credit)

Google is, however, very good at locating the nearest Starbucks. I insist on a stop (for research, of course). It is full of young males with expensive hair.

"I guess we've seen Tyre, then?" I say, and S and I look out at the palm trees and the dazzle of the sun on the water, and get back in the car to try and thread our way back out to the highway again.

*

On the day we leave the south behind and strike north towards Beirut, we take our flimsiest chance yet, following a google search to something called the Genco Oil Company in the hills above the city. 

At the marked waypoint we find a villa with a fountain, ringed by tall trees. There is no sign or placard of any kind.

"Maybe it's just a tax thing," S hazards. "A business that doesn't really exist?"

It seems important, having come all this way, to make sure, and the great gates to the property are open, so I get out of the car and walk through the gardens without much hope. At the back of the villa I find a set of stairs, which lead to a man sitting behind a desk. He blinks at me in surprise.

"Genco Oil?" I ask. 

Ibrahim, for that is the man's name, beams back at me. "Of course!" he says, asks me to wait a moment while he finds some shoes, then proceeds to take us on a two hour tour of his olive groves, which he has interplanted with thyme and rosemary, explaining the cultivars he uses, telling us of the Italian government school for olive oil he was the first person from the Middle East to attend ("they had an interpreter sit next to anyone who didn't speak Italian; I liked their chaotic approach, it was very familiar"), and inviting us into the warehouse where the distilling, settling and packaging is done. 

We buy some unmarked bottles of the new harvest, and his woodland honey, and we sample more olive oil in one hour than an ordinary human can comfortably consume in a year. Then we sit as the sun sets by the fountain and eat dates he has brought back from Saudia Arabia, and talk about the construction industry and worker conditions and Lebanese politics until the mosquitos are biting. 

"What on earth was that," I ask S, and we find ourselves grinning all the way back down to the highway, where the outskirts of Beirut begin and the roads all start to converge, the chaos of the evening traffic swallowing us easily up, Google routing and rerouting us again.