Onward to Baalbek - March 22

After two failed attempts, we finally made it to Baalbek... We drove back to Byblos after the Cedars and stayed the night (see photo in below post of sunset over Byblos harbour). The hardest part was just getting onto the right road out of Beirut... we must have driven around the city for about an hour. Finally, while consulting the map trying to see how many more kilometers to Baalbek, we saw the incredibly impressive ruins just sitting there off to the left hand side of the road. We stopped the car and a group of hawkers came running to the side of the car trying to sell us old coins, tesbit (prayer beads) and Hezbollah T-shirts. Finally, we made our way past them and into the ruins.
While there is much to be said about Baalbek, I can't find the words... nor did I find the write up in the guide books to be much more than a description of what the site must have looked like long ago. An area with Christians (or Maronites to be exact) and Muslims, the explanation of the pagan religious practices once observed here were not ignored... (I mention this because here in Kurdistan, even the museum in Sulemaniya does not dare suggest pagan origins of any site or artifact or label the ancient discoveries accurately - is it shameful to label a small statuette as a mother goddess figure? Additionally, it seems many Kurds living here do not see the Assyrian ruins discovered in their hometowns in any way related to them). 

In any case, this is not the case in Lebanon: It recongnizes the trade with Egyptians and others and the influences on life... and even those improtant exchanges in much more recent history - like when Sultan Abdülhamid II of Turkey and the German emperor Kaiser Wilhelm II visited together in 1898. I recommend you view the photos below and then just look up the history if you are interested... 

Beautiful temple of Bacchus pictured above. J, who had visited Athens in his past travels, said that the Parthenon would be completely overshadowed by this site... the only advantage of the Parthenon being that it is on a hill and looks nice illuminated at night.

And above are the largest columns ever discovered... absolutely huge... And amazing... Each contained holes in the base, which were used to insert triangular irons bits which were expanded inside and used - with the aid of pulleys and ancient "cranes" to hoist the columns. Amazing what people accomplished in the past. The buildings at this site were never completely finished, but each took about 200+ years to build. The huge columns were part of what was once the Temple of Jupiter.
And finally, after struggling to avoid the touts and hawkers, we decided NOT to stay in Baalbek and sip drinks in the foyer of the Palmyra Hotel, but to backtrack to Zahle and sleep in the Hotel Monte Alberto with its kitsch revolving restaurant and funicular to summer terrace and enjoy the above view of the valley watched over by a monumental statue of Santa Maria perched on stair-cased pedestal high on a hill.