Taxi to Qadisha

One Sunday a few weeks ago I stood in a friend’s apartment in Geitawi at 9am. Four of us, including our Arabic teacher, had decided to rent a car together and drive to the Qadisha Valley, in the hilly interior in the north east a couple of hours or so from Beirut. The car had been rented in a stereotypically Arab way, by word of mouth. The baker on the bottom floor of the building had a son who rented out cars. They were good cars. He can rent you one for a very good price. We called to confirm the booking several times during the week. Sure, I’ll drop the car off at yours. I’ll be there at 9. No problem, ma fii mishkileh.

When the day came and neither the baker’s son nor the car arrived, no explanation was forthcoming from his switched off phone or the suddenly taciturn baker. At a loss, we flagged a taxi and asked whether he knew of any car rental companies that were open on Sundays. Sure, he knew, mish mishkileh. He’d be happy to take us there for the special tourist price of 10 dollars.  For 10,000 Lebanese lira, two thirds of this, we had a deal. He took us far into Sin el-Fil, to an establishment that seemingly only rented white Bentleys and convertibles for weddings and had a minimum rental period of four days. Great. We asked the driver if he knew of anywhere else. Ma fii mishkileh. He drove round in a large convoluted circle and ended back at the wedding company, presumably thinking we wouldn’t remember what it looked like.

Once we had taken leave of this clown we flagged down a new taxi, deciding to go to the Armenian quarter, Bourj Hammoud, in a final attempt at finding a car before conceding defeat. A white Toyota estate pulled up. We hopped in, our teacher in the front. After a couple of minutes of generally indecipherable chatter with the driver he turned around and said to us, ‘Don’t worry, he’s Syrian, and he knows someone in Bourj Hammoud’. We went to Bourj Hammoud and again were unsuccessful after a bizarre episode in which we had to shout from the street to an overweight middle aged man hanging over the side of the third floor balcony of his apartment above his flower shop, just so he could tell us ‘ma fii sayarat’ – no cars. 

We decided to ask the Syrian taxi driver, Mazin, to take us to the Qadisha Valley. He offered us a fair price immediately which wasn’t a great deal more expensive than renting our own car would have been. He was around thirty with a Lebanese wife and child, of whom he had a picture on his phone. He drove diligently, which we were as grateful for on the hairpin gravel tracks of the Qadisha valleyside as we were in the midst of the hair-raising motorway traffic. He often stopped to ask directions, and would thank the helpful passers by with the polite expression 'Kilak/kilik zaw', literally 'You're all manners'.

Lebanon is a country of diverse beauty of a kind that affects a different nostalgia on you wherever you go; whether to the white beaches of the Mediterranean, the stony hillsides in the southern interior, the verdant Chouf, or the rolling plateau of the Bekaa.  The Qadisha Valley, with its stupefying gorges and quaint Christian hillside towns, is possibly the most wondrous of all. We stopped and ate fresh cherries plucked from a tree that seemed to mark the exact centre of the valley. We visited the childhood home of the famous poet Gibran Khalil Gibran. We drove down into the valley and ate kafta sandwiches by a waterfall and visited an old church which looked like it had been grown out of the granite of the cliff. We drove up to the top of the hills and walked out amongst the Cedar trees, the national emblem of the Lebanese flag, now all but wiped out from its countryside. Mazin joined us, preferring our company to waiting in his car.

 

On the way back we were predictably stuck in the end-of-weekend traffic which causes standstills on the motorway around Jounieh. Mazin sang Syrian songs. Our teacher switched on the radio as if to drown him out. We all laughed, switched off the radio again and listened as we edged onwards.