Holidays in Hell: Travels to the World's Worst Places and Asks What's Funny About This?

by P. J. O'Rourke

  A surprising lot of Beirut stands, however. A building with a missing story here, a lot with a missing building there, shattered this next to untouched that-all the usual ironies of war except with great restaurants.

  The Summerland Hotel, on the beach in the ruined south suburbs, has good hamburgers. The wealthy Moslems, including Shiites, go here. All Shiites are not stern zealots. Some have string bikinis. And, like an American ethnic group with origins nearby, they wear their jewelry in the pool. (It was at the Summerland where the Amal militia feted its American captives during the 1985 TWA hostage crisis)

  Downtown on the Corniche you can lunch at the St. Georges Hotel, once Beirut's best. The hotel building is now a burned shell, but the pool club is still open. You can go waterskiing here, even during the worst fighting.

  I asked the bartender at the pool club, "Don't the waterskiers worry about sniper fire?"

  "Oh, no, no, no," he said, "the snipers are mostly armed with automatic weapons-these are not very accurate."

  Down the quay, pristine among the ruins, Chez Temporal serves excellent food. A short but careful walk through a heavily armed Druse neighborhood brings you to Le Grenier, once a jet-set mob scene, now a quiet hideaway with splendid native dishes. Next door there's first-rate Italian fare at Quo Vadis. Be sure to tip the man who insists, at gunpoint, on guarding your car.

  Spaghetteria is a favorite with the foreign press. The Italian specials are good, and there's a spectacular view of military patrols and nighttime skirmishing along the beachfront. Sit near the window if you feel lucky.

  Addresses are unnecessary. Taxi drivers know the way and when it's safe to go there. Service at all these establishments is good, more than good. You may find ten or a dozen waiters hovering at your side. If trouble breaks out, the management will have one or two employees escort you home. When ordering, avoid most native wines, particularly the whites. Mousar '75, however, is an excellent red. Do not let the waiters serve you Cypriot brandy after the meal. It's vile.

  The Commodore also has restaurants. These are recommended during fighting. The Commodore always manages to get food delivered no matter what the situation outdoors.

  Nightlife begins late in Beirut. Cocktail hour at the Commodore is eight P.M., when U.S. editors and network executives are safely at lunch (there's a seven-hour time difference). The Commodore is strictly neutral territory with only one rule. No guns at the bar. All sorts of raffish characters hang about, expatriates from Palestine, Libya and Iran, officers in mufti from both sides of the Lebanese Army, and combatants of other stripes. I overheard one black Vietnam veteran loudly describe to two British girls how he teaches orthodox Moslem women to fight with knives. And there are diplomats, spooks and dealers in gold, arms and other things. At least that's what they seem to be. No one exactly announces his occupation- except the journalists, of course.

  I met one young lady from Atlanta who worked on a CNN camera crew. She was twenty-six, cute, slightly plump and looked like she should have been head of the Georgia State pep squad. I sat next to her at the Commodore bar and watched her drink twenty-five gin and tonics in a row. She never got drunk, never slurred a word, but along about G&T number twenty-two out came the stories about dismembered babies and dead bodies flying all over the place and the Red Cross picking up hands and feet and heads from bomb blasts and putting them all in a trash dumpster. "So I asked the Red Cross people," she said, in the same sweet Dixie accent, "like, what's this? Save 'em, collect 'em, trade 'em with your friends?"

  Everyone in Beirut can hold his or her liquor. If you get queasy, Muhammad, the Commodore bartender, has a remedy rivaling Jeevess in P.G. Wodehouse's novels. It will steady your stomach so you can drink more. You'll want to. No one in this part of the world is without a horror story, and, at the Commodore bar, you'll hear most of them.

  Dinner, if anyone remembers to have it, is at ten or so. People go out in groups. It's not a good idea to be alone and blonde after dark. Kidnapping is the one great innovation of the Lebanese civil war. And Reuters correspondent, Johnathan Wright, had disappeared thus on his way to the Bekaa Valley a few days before I arrived.

  If nabbed, make as much noise as possible. Do not get in anyone's car. If forced in, attack the driver. At least this is what I'm told.

  Be circumspect when driving at night. Other cars should be given a wide berth. Flick headlights off and on to indicate friendly approach. Turn on the dome light when arriving at checkpoints. Militiamen will fire a couple of bursts in your direction if they want you to slow down.

  Clubs, such as the Backstreet near the Australian Embassy, keep going as late as you can stand it. There's some dancing, much drinking and, if you yell at the management, they'll keep the Arab music off the tape deck. Cocaine is available at about fifty dollars a gram and is no worse than what you get in New York.

  Beirut nightlife is not elaborate, but it is amusing. When danger waits the tables and death is the busboy, it adds zest to the simple pleasures of life. There's poignant satisfaction in every puff of a cigarette or sip of a martini. The jokes are funnier, the drinks are stronger, the bonds of affection more powerfully felt than they'll ever be at Club Med.

  East Beirut is said to also have good restaurants and nightclubs. But the visitor staying on the West side probably won't see them. No one likes to cross the Green Line at night. And, frankly, the East isn't popular with the West-side crowd. All the window glass is taped, and the storefronts are sandbagged over there. It gives the place a gloomy look. No one would think of doing this in the West. It would be an insult to the tradition of Oriental fatalism, and nobody would be able to see all the cartons of smuggled Marlboros stacked in the window. Anyway, the East-side Christians are too smug, too pseudo-French and haven't been shelled enough to turn them into party reptiles.

  To travel to the rest of Lebanon you just hail a taxi. The country is only one hundred and twenty miles long and forty miles wide, and no Lebanese cab driver has to call home to ask his wife if he can take off for a couple days. Settle the price first. This won't be easy. It's not the way of the Levant to come to the point. I asked Akbar, one of the Commodore's taximen, how much he'd charge to take me through the Israeli lines and into South Lebanon.

  "I have been in this business twenty-seven years," he said.

  "Yes," I said, "but how much is it going to cost me?"

  "I will tell you later."

  "Give me a rough idea."

  "Would you like a coffee?"

  "What's your hourly rate?"

  "Across the street-fine rugs at the best price. I will get you a discount."

  "What do you charge by the mile?"

  "I have a cousin in Detroit."

  "Akbar," I shouted, "what's it going to cost?!"

  "If you do not like my price, I tell you what," Akbar gestured grandly, "you do not hire me anymore again."

  Make sure your driver knows English well enough to translate. Lebanese English is often a triumph of memorization over understanding. "I come from the village of Baabdat," the driver will say in quite an acceptable accent, "it is very beautiful there in the mountains."

  "Right," you'll say, "but you'd better pull over, that guy behind the sandbags is leveling an anti-tank gun at us."

  "You do?" the driver will say, "Is that in Texas? I have a nephew in Houston."

  Wherever you go, it's important to leave early in the morning. Those who think the war is dangerous have not seen the traffic in Beirut. It's a city of a million people with three stoplights and these aren't working. There are some traffic cops, but they are on no account to be minded as they tend to wave you into the path of dump trucks going sixty miles an hour. All driving is at top speed, much of it on the sidewalks since most parking is done in the middle of the streets. The only firm rule is: Armored personnel carriers have the right of way.

  Once outside Beirut there are, of course, other difficulties. The only land route into the Israeli-occupied South goes through the Chouf mountains to a c
rossing point in the town of Bater, which is separated from Beirut by forty miles of armed Druse. You can also take a boat to Sidon from the Phalange-controlled docks in East Beirut if you're a Christian. I am, but there seemed to be some difficulty anyway. First they said they would have to ask Israeli permission because I was a journalist. Next they told me they didn't speak English. Then they quit speaking French.

  On the way to Bater my driver took me past "Green Beach," the former U.S. Marine emplacement and very interesting to students of military history. It's as defensible a position as the bottom of the air shaft in the Plaza Hotel. There's hardly a spot in Lebanon from which you can't fire a gun and hit it. Don't get out of the car. The beach is now an Amal military base under heavy guard because it's next to the orthodox Shiite women's bathing area. They wear ankle-length chadors in the water, which may explain the lack of a world-class Shiite women's swim team.

  In the Chouf mountains, the land is green and exquisite, cut through with precipitous gorges. Even the steepest slopes have been terraced and planted with fruit trees, vineyards, olive groves and gun emplacements. The road is narrow with no railings or shoulders, and traffic is slow because the Druse are usually moving artillery around preparing to blast the Phalangists on the coast. Be sure to keep a mental note of such things. It's considered good manners to convey information about military movements to the next faction down the road. This takes the place of celebrity gossip in Lebanese small talk.

  The Druse militiamen were good-natured. "Do you speak Arabic?" asked one. I shook my head, and he said something to another soldier who poked face and gun into the car and shouted, "He just said he wants to fuck your mother!" At least, I assume this was good-natured.

  The Druse villages are built in the Ottoman style, graceful, foursquare sandstone buildings with balconies, arched windows and fifteen-foot ceilings. The low-pitched hip roofs are covered in red tile. Tidy gardens surround each house. Peasants in white skull caps and baggy-crotched jodhpurs ride donkeys along the road. Herds of goats meander in the streets. It's all quite timeless except for the video-cassette rental stores, unisex hair salons and Mercedes-Benz sedans all over the place.

  The Bater crossing was another matter. A couple hundred Lebanese, mostly old people, women and children, were jammed into line behind barbed wire, waiting for the crossing to open. Several hundred more squatted in the dirt or milled about disconsolate. These, apparently, did not have their papers in order. Some had been there for days. A few tents had been provided but no toilets. There was no running water and no food other than what people had brought with them. Soldiers from the Israeli-hired South Lebanon Army were yelling, pointing guns and threatening everyone. The sun was hot. A few of the women and all of the babies were crying. The smell was horrendous.

  There seemed to be no way to tell when the crossing would open. My driver, Akbar, didn't have any ideas. I was not about to get in line behind the barbed wire. It looked too much like BergenBelsen. No one in sight, as far as I could tell, was in charge of anything but pistol waving.

  On top of an embankment about a hundred yards on the other side of the crossing was a machine gun nest with the star of David flying over it. I took my passport out and, holding it shoulder high, walked through the barbed wire and tank traps. I fixed the South Lebanon Army guards with a stare I hoped would remind them of Grenada. `American," I said. They backed away, and I headed as coolly as I could for the muzzle of the Israeli .50-caliber machine gun now being pointed at my chest.

  Israelis are not well-liked in West Beirut. During 1982 the Israelis besieged the Moslem part of town. There was no electricity and little food or water. The shelling and air strikes sometimes went on for twelve hours at a stretch. Beirut's journalists call the Israelis "Schlomos" and consider them war criminals and also real squares.

  Personally, I was glad to confront the only armed maniacs in the Middle East who aren't allowed to shoot U.S. citizens. I hoped they remembered.

  "That's my helmet you're wearing," I was thinking. "Those are my boots, and I paid for that gun so you can just go point it at someone else." Not that I said this aloud. The hole a .50-caliber bullet comes out of is not small. It looks as if you could put your whole foot in there.

  The Israelis motioned for me to come up, and I climbed the embankment. They held the machine gun on me until it became clear I was not a peroxided Iranian. "You must speak to the captain," they said.

  He proved to be a boy of twenty-five. "Do you speak English?" I said.

  "Gee, sure," said the captain. The Lebanese kept a respectful distance until they saw him talking to me. Then they descended in a horde waving unlikely-looking slips of paper and shouting the interminable explanations of the east. The captain's escort chased them away with shoves and curses. The women, children and old folks pressed back with no apparent fear. Finally, they pushed the officer and me under a guard tower. "Welcome to Lebanon" is the phrase everyone uses whenever anything untoward or chaotic breaks loose.

  "Welcome to Lebanon," said the Israeli captain. He read my credentials and smiled. "Tourism?"

  "Yes," I said, "I'm the only tourist in Lebanon."

  The captain laughed. "Oh no, you're not. I'm a reservist, you know, and this is my vacation, too."

  The Israelis wouldn't, however, allow my car through. I told Akbar to meet me there in two days and then hiked across noman's-land to a line of taxis on the other side.

  There were three stages in crossing the Israeli lines. Once through the checkpoint at Bater, I had to go by taxi to an interrogation center a few miles up the road. From the interrogation center I took a bus eight or ten miles to another checkpoint in Jezzine.

  At the interrogation stop I was searched and questioned by Shin Bet, the Israeli F.B.I. An enlisted man apologized for the inconvenience. Less auspicious-looking travelers were being led off to be grilled in windowless huts.

  In Jezzine I was questioned again by the South Lebanon Army, an interesting process since we had no language in common.

  I hired another taxi to take me the fifteen miles from Jezzine to Sidon. It took five hours to get through the Bater-Jezzine crossing and a total of eight hours to make it from Beirut to Sidon. Before the war it was an hour drive on the coast road.

  Sidon and Tyre, the two coastal cities of southern Lebanon, were once the principal towns of ancient Phoenicia and spawned a mercantile empire from Turkey to Spain. Important archaeological work has been done in both places, exposing six millennia of human misbehavior. Lebanon has been overrun in turn by Canaanites, Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Crusaders, Arabs again, Turks, French, more Arabs, Israelis and occasional U. S. Marines. Perhaps by means of the past one can begin to comprehend the present. Or learn which way to run from the future.

  I hired a Palestinian Christian driver named Simon and had him take me twenty-five miles down the lush coast littoral to Tyre. We passed through ten or a dozen Israeli guard posts. These are heaps of sandbags with anxious eyes and many gun barrels sticking over the top. They look down upon a series of "Khomeini gates," cement barriers that jut into the road like meshing-gear teeth and force vehicles to zig-zag slowly between them in single file. If you stall in the middle of these, you die.

  The roadsides all over Lebanon are piled with trash, the coast road especially so. Beaches and parks are even worse. There's something about a civil war that brings out the litterbug in people.

  Tyre is an awful mess of dirty modern architecture, offal and the detritus of battle. The Elissa Beach Club hotel, on the south shore of the Tyre peninsula, may be one of the few oceanside hotels anyplace where none of the rooms face the sea. But it's clean, the hot water is not actually cold and the food's passable. Also, there's nowhere else to stay.

  Simon went home for the night, and I was left on the hotel's roof terrace about a thousand miles from the nearest example of the Four Freedoms. "I have a cousin in Cincinnati" was the only English anyone could speak. I watched the sun go down be
hind the ruins of some previous attempt to bring the rule of law to these climes.

  I'd hoped at least for a good night's sleep. There'd been quite a few bombs going off in Beirut. I'd heard five the night before, starting with one at midnight in a bar a few blocks from the Commodore and winding up with a spectacular attempt on the life of the minister of education at six A. M. This took windows out for three blocks around and shook the furniture in my room. The minister survived but my repose did not. But this night, it turned out, was the beginning of the Hajj, the Moslem holiday marking the return of the Mecca pilgrims, and the urchins next door celebrated with a six-hour firecracker fight in the street. Then at two A. M. there was a truly horrendous explosion.

  No use looking around the next day to see what's been blasted. Everything has been already.

  Later I read in the Beirut newspapers that while I was in the south there were four sniping attacks on Israeli patrols, the South Lebanon Army had stormed a section of Sidon, there was a riot at a Palestinian refugee camp near Jezzine, and the coast road was heavily shelled. I noticed none of this. On the other hand, no explosion in Tyre was reported. This illustrates the difficulty, in Lebanon, of knowing what's happening, even to yourself.

  In the morning I visited the principal archaeological digs. These are all decorated with small blue and white signs saying the ruins are national treasures protected by the convention of the Hague of 12 May 1954, and in case of armed conflict notify UNESCO. I suppose I should have phoned.

  The oldest and most extensive excavation, near the ancient port, has revealed Phoenician house foundations, a Hellenistic theater, a long, colonnaded walk from Roman times and parts of a Crusader wall. Some pretense is made of keeping these in order. They are guarded by one desultory fellow in a fez. After I'd wandered beyond the palings for an hour, he whistled at me to get out. Nearby a newer dig has uncovered a Roman temple now being used as a garbage dump.

  Half a mile or so inland is a much larger site, which I couldn't find mentioned in any guidebooks. Not that there are many Lebanon guidebooks. I couldn't find any in U. S. bookstores. And the Hachette guide I purchased in Beirut was twenty years old. Other than this I was relying on a 1876 Baedeker I found in a New England thrift shop. It was not without useful advice: