Holidays in Hell: In Which Our Intrepid Reporter Travels to the World's Worst Places and Asks, "What's Funny About This" (4 page)

The tourism ethic seems to have spread like one of the new
sexual diseases. It now infects every aspect of daily life. People
carry backpacks to work and out on dates. People dress like
tourists at the office, the theater and church. People are as rude to
their fellow countrymen as ever they are to foreigners.

Maybe the right thing to do is stay home in a comfy armchair
and read about travel as it should be-in Samuel Clemenss
Huckleberry Finn.

OCTOBER 1984

I visited Lebanon in the fall of '84, which turned out to be pretty
much the last time an American could travel in that country with
only a risk (rather than a certainty) of being kidnapped. I was just
taking a vacation. Somehow I had convinced Vanity Fair magazine
to let me do a piece on the holiday pleasures of Beirut and its
environs. What follows is, with a few parenthetical addenda, the
article I wrote for Vanity Fair, an article that they-wisely, I thinkdecided was much too weird to publish.

"Bassboat." "Bizport." "Passboot." "Pisspot." It's the one
English word every Lebanese understands and no Lebanese can
say. The first, deepest and most enduring impression from a visit to
Lebanon is an endless series of faces, with gun barrels, poking
through the car window and mispronouncing your travel documents.

Some of these faces belong to the Lebanese Army, some to the
Christian Phalange, some to angry Shiites or blustering Druse or
grumpy Syrian draftees or Scarsdale-looking Israeli reservists. And who knows what the rest of them belong to. Everybody with a gun
has a checkpoint in Lebanon. And in Lebanon you'd be crazy not to
have a gun. Though, I assure you, all the crazy people have guns,
too.

You fumble for passes and credentials thinking, "Is this
Progressive Socialist or Syrian Socialist National Party territory?
Will the Amal militia kill me if I give them a Lebanese Army press
card? And what's Arabic, anyway, for `Me? American? Don't make
me laugh'?"

The gun barrels all have the bluing worn off the ends as
though from being rubbed against people's noses. The interesting
thing about staring down a gun barrel is how small the hole is
where the bullet comes out, yet what a big difference it would make
in your social schedule. Not that people shoot you very often, but
the way they flip those weapons around and bang them on the
pavement and poke them in the dirt and scratch their ears with the
muzzle sights . . . Gun safety merit badges must go begging in the
Lebanese Boy Scouts.

On the other hand, Lebanon is notably free of tour groups and
Nikon-toting Japanese. The beaches, though shell-pocked and
occasionally mined, are not crowded. Ruins of historical interest
abound, in fact, block most streets. Hotel rooms are plentiful. No
reservation is necessary at even the most popular restaurant
(though it is advisable to ask around and find out if the place is
likely to be bombed later). And what could be more unvarnished
and authentic than a native culture armed to the teeth and bent on
murder, pillage and rape?

One minor difficulty with travel to Lebanon is you can't.
There's no such thing as a tourist visa. Unless you're a journalist,
diplomat or arms salesman, they won't let you in. And if you
believe that, you'll never understand the Orient. Type a letter
saying you're an American economist studying stabilization of the
Lebanese pound or something. (Sound currency is one thing all
factions agree on. The Central Bank is the best guarded and least
shelled building in Beirut.) I had a letter saying I was studying the
tourism industry in Lebanon.

"The tourism industry?" said the pretty young woman at the
Lebanese Consulate.

"Yes," I said.

"Tourism?"

I nodded.

She shrugged. "Well, be sure to go see my village of Beit
Mery. It's very beautiful. If you make it."

Middle East Airlines is the principal carrier to Beirut. They
fly from London, Paris, Frankfurt and Rome-sometimes. When
the airport's being shelled, you can take a boat from Larnaca,
Cyprus.

There are a number of Beirut hotels still operating. The best is
the Commodore in West Beirut's El Hamra district. This is the
headquarters for the international press corps. There are plenty of
rooms available during lulls in the fighting. If combat is intense,
telex Beirut 20595 for reservations. The Commodore's basement is
an excellent bomb shelter. The staff is cheerful, efficient and will
try to get you back if you're kidnapped.

There's a parrot in the bar at the Commodore that does an
imitation of an in-coming howitzer shell and also whistles the
Marseillaise. Only once in ten years of civil war has this bar been
shot up by any of the pro-temperance Shiite militias. Even then the
management was forewarned so only some Pepsi bottles and maybe
a stray BBC stringer were damaged. Get a room away from the pool.
It's harder to hit that side of the building with artillery. Rates are
about fifty dollars per night. They'll convert your bar bill to laundry
charges if you're on an expense account.

Beirut, at a glance, lacks charm. The garbage has not been
picked up since 1975. The ocean is thick with raw sewage, and
trash dots the surf. Do not drink the water. Leeches have been
known to pop out the tap. Electricity is intermittent.

It is a noisy town. Most shops have portable gasoline generators set out on the sidewalk. The racket from these combines with
incessant horn-honking, scattered gunfire, loud Arab music from
pushcart cassette vendors, much yelling among the natives and
occasional car bombs. Israeli jets also come in from the sea most
afternoons, breaking the sound barrier on their way to targets in the
Bekaa Valley. A dense brown haze from dump fires and car exhaust
covers the city. Air pollution probably approaches a million parts
per million. This, however, dulls the sense of smell.

There are taxis always available outside the Commodore. I
asked one of the drivers, Najib, to show me the sights. I wanted to
see the National Museum, the Great Mosque, the Place des Martyrs, the Bois de Pins, the Corniche and Hotel Row. Perhaps Najib
misunderstood or maybe he had his own ideas about sight-seeing.
He took me to the Green Line. The Green Line's four crossings
were occupied by the Lebanese Army-the Moslem Sixth Brigade
on one side, the Christian Fifth Brigade on the other. Though under
unified command, their guns were pointed at each other. This
probably augurs ill for political stability in the region.

The wise traveler will pack shirts or blouses with ample breast
pockets. Reaching inside a jacket for your passport looks too much
like going for the draw and puts armed men out of continence.

At the Port Crossing, on the street where all the best
whorehouses were, the destruction is perfectly theatrical. Just
enough remains of the old buildings to give an impression of
erstwhile grandeur. Mortars, howitzers and rocket-propelled grenades have not left a superfluous brush stroke on the scrim. Turn
the corner into the old marketplace, the Souk, however, and the set
is a Hollywood back lot. Small arms and sniper fire have left
perfectly detailed havoc. Every square inch is painstakingly bulletnibbled. Rubble spills artfully out of doorways. Roofs and cornices
have been deftly crenulated by explosion. Everything is ready for
Ernest Borgnine, John Cassavetes and Lee Marvin in a remake of
The Dirty Dozen, except the Lebanese can't figure out how to
remove the land mines.

We went back and forth across the Green Line six times, then
drove into Beirut's south suburbs. This area was once filled with
apartment buildings housing the Moslem middle class. The buildings were destroyed by Israeli air strikes during the invasion of
1982. Modern construction techniques and modern war planes
create a different kind of ruin. Balconies, windows and curtain
walls disintegrate completely. Reinforced concrete floors fold like
Venetian-blind slats and hang by their steel rebars from the buildings' utility cores. Or they land in a giant card-house tumble. Shiite
squatter families are living in the triangles and trapezoids formed
by the fallen slabs. There's a terrible lack of unreality to this part of
the city.

Outside the areas controlled by the Lebanese Army the
checkpoints are more numerous, less organized and manned by
teenagers in jeans, T-shirts and Adidas running shoes. They carry
Russian instead of U. S. weapons. Some belong to the Shiite Amal
militia, others to the even more radical Hezbullah. All have strong
feelings about America. Fortunately, they can't read. One even
held my Arabic press credentials upside down, picture and all, and
tipped his head like a parakeet to see if I matched my inverted
photo. At the most dangerous-looking checkpoints, Najib said
something that made the guards laugh and wave us through.

"Najib," I said, "what are you telling them?"

He said, "I tell them you travel for pleasure."

Finally, we got to a place where we could go no further. Down
the street the Sunni Moslem Mourabitoun militia was having it out
with the Shiite Amal militia-part of the long-standing Sunni/
Shiite dispute about whether Muhammad's uncle Abbas or Muhammad's son-in-law Ali should have succeeded the Prophet and, also,
about who gets the take from the south-side gambling joints.

West Beirut can also be toured on foot. You'll find the city is
full of surprises-a sacking of the Saudi embassy because of long
lines for visas to Mecca, for instance, or shelling of the lower town
by an unidentified gunboat or car bombs several times a day.
Renaults are the favored vehicles. Avoid double-parked Le Cars.
Do not, however, expect the population to be moping around
glassy-eyed. There's lots of jewelry and make-up and the silliest
Italian designer jeans on earth. The streets are jammed. Everyone's very busy, though not exactly working. They're rushing from
one place to another in order to sit around drinking hundreds of
tiny cups of Turkish coffee and chat at the top of their lungs. The
entire economy is fueled, as far as I could see, by everyone selling
cartons of smuggled Marlboros to each other.

It turns out I didn't miss much on Najib's style of guided tour.
The Bois de Pins, planted in the 1600s by Emir Fakhr ed Din to
protect Beirut from encroaching sand dunes, had all its foliage
blown off by Israeli jets and looks like a phone-pole farm. The
Place des Martyrs, so-called because eleven nationalists were
hanged there by the Turks in 1915, is right on the Green line and
now all that much more aptly named. Most of the buildings on the
Corniche have literally been face-lifted. The old American Em bassy is here, in the same state as U.S. Middle East policy. The
British Embassy down the street is completely draped in anti-bomb
nets imported from Belfast. Hotel Row was ravaged at the beginning of the civil war in 1975. The high-rise Holiday Inn is a delight
to the eye. Who, when traveling around the earth faced with
endless Holiday Inns, has not fantasized blowing one to Hinders?
The National Museum is bricked up and surrounded with tanksno nagging sense of cultural obligation to tour this historical
treasure trove. I couldn't find the Great Mosque at all.

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.