All Different Roads

A wee intro to Uzbekistan

Uzbekistan is one of the weirder stops on our trip so a geography lesson might be in order. Located in Central Asia near a lot of the other ‘Stans, Uzbekistan was under Russian rule from the 1860’s until the fall of the USSR in 1991. Over 90% of Uzbekistan’s citizens self identify as Sunni Muslim, but 130 years of Soviet rule have resulted in a pretty dilute (and distorted) adherence to Islam. Many cities in present-day Uzbekistan were key waypoints on the Silk Road, and the stunning mosques, madrassas, and caravanserais built along the trade route are the main draw for tourists.

Arranging travel in Uzbekistan is hard, and to get a visa you need to apply for a letter of invitation. You have to be careful to find hotels that are ‘licensed’ to host foreigners, and booking trains is tricky. Jeff and I departed from our usual travel style and booked our Uzbekistan trip with a travel agency called Caravanistan to help us arrange drivers, trains, hotels, and guides. Our itinerary relied on trains wherever possible, and included Tashkent, Fergana Valley, Samarkand, Bukara, and Khiva.

Tashkent

Like most travelers to Uzbekistan, our first stop was the capital city Tashkent. Like most travelers to Uzbekistan, our first thought was, “This place is odd. Like, really… odd.” Tashkent is massive city geographically, and its streets are remarkably wide (definitely wide enough to turn around a wagon). In stark contrast with the city’s physical size, the streets are completely empty. No traffic, no vendors, and no pedestrians. I honestly don’t believe the cited 2.3 million population statistic – there’s no way. It’s a strange feeling to be in a big but empty city and much more Pyongyang-y than Jeff and I anticipated. We arrived at 6:00 pm ‘rush hour’, but we easily breezed our way from the airport to our hotel in like 10 minutes.

We stayed at the Hotel Uzbekistan, and it was the living embodiment of the Soviet era. The hotel is a massive 16-floor structure best described as ‘Socialist Modernism’ and taking the elevator to our room on the 15^th floor was a triumph of our patience and endurance. The breakfast was served in a gaudy ball-room fit for a Russian ‘Sweet 16’ party, and consisted of Wonder Bread and margarine inexplicably floating in ice water. To cater to the 10 hotel guests there were 1,000 employees, each of whom was especially eager to change money.

And speaking of money in Uzbekistan… it’s complicated. There is a ‘government’ exchange rate ($1 USD = 4,000 Uzbek SOM), a ‘black market’ exchange rate ($1 USD = 8,000 + 1,000 SOM), and widespread use of the US dollar. The largest denomination is 5,000 SOM ($0.62) which means you pay for everything with unwieldy stacks of cash like a drug dealer. In Uzbekistan’s cash-centric economy, haggling and paying for everything can be an awkward multivariate math problem so we found it best to stick to one currency. Using dollars means you’re negotiating an exchange rate with each transaction, so SOM it was. Luckily every taxi driver is willing to change money and it’s a bit of a thrill to be handed giant stacks of cash by a cabbie in a dark corner of a parking lot.

I’m rich!!!!

This is like $100 USD in Uzbek SOM.

Money changed and iced margarine consumed, we were ready to start our tour of Tashkent. Our guide Somiya met us at our hotel and throughout our tour she was stubbornly dedicated to the party line. Like other countries with difficult pasts (or presents), tour guides in Uzbekistan are certified by the government and usually adhere to their approved script. Uzbekistan is the place where the women are strong, the men are good looking, and all the children are above average. 😉

Somiya took us to the fantastic Applied Art Museum, the Abdul Kasim Madrassah, and the Khast Imam Complex, which houses the Samarkand Kufic Quran, one of the oldest Korans in the world. The Koran was beautiful, and was written in an old style ‘Kufic’ script. Evidently the book was splattered in the owner’s blood when he was stabbed whist reading the Koran (awww), and splatter has dated the book to the 8^th or 9^th century.

Jeff and I outside of the Abulkasym Madrassah in Tashkent.

More madrassa shots.

An example of the Kufic Script in the Samarkand Koran. The red dots are vocal cues for reading the text aloud.

The Applied Arts Museum had amazing stuff. This is an embroidered ‘suzani’, or bed cloth. The stuff was great!!!!

Here’s an example of a creepy Tashkent building. Multiply this by 1,000 and you have the entire city. Icky.

We also visited the Chorsu bazzar, where we got a nice introduction to the meats of Uzbekistan. All the meats.

The outside of Tashkent’s Chorsu Bazar.

Inside the meat hall. Oddly, it didn’t stink.

You can get meat here!!! Just look at that sheep rump.

This gentleman valiantly tried to sell us some liver. “B-B-Q, B-B-Q!” he told us.

This truly is no country for vegetarians (or people with a reasonable diet).

Salty dried yogurt nubs. Not great, not terrible.

Some bread on offering. The center decoration is the bakery’s phone number.

The ovens in the bakery. Quite the site.

Spices!!! I bought some pepper and like 3 pounds of dried apricots.

The final stop on our day with Somiya was Tashkent’s Independence Square. Every former communist city has a Freedom Square (aka the former Lenin Square), and they’re always an interesting sociological study. Jeff has a mathematical theory that the geographic size of any city’s ‘Freedom Square’ is inversely proportional to actual freedom – and often directly proportional to the number of protesters killed in said square. In Uzbekistan our theory holds true… The square was super huge, desolate, and odd. I could just taste the freedom.

Freedom Square!!!!! So, so free.

A grotesque memorial to those who died in the 1966 earthquake. The outstretched arm is meant to say “Halt, earthquake”. Or something like that….

A monument to an unmarked grave of thousands found after the Stalin era. Man, Tashkent’s monuments are comically grim.

After a long and surreal day in Tashkent, Jeff and I ventured out on our own to find some food. Instead we found our favorite thing in Tashkent – the Tashkent metro system. Built during the Soviet era, the city’s metro stations are elaborately decorated and often aggressively themed. We visited the most well known station, the Kosmonavtlar Station, which is a space-exploration-themed station dedicated to Tashkent’s very own cosmonaut Vladimir Aleksandrovich Dzhanibekov. The walls of the station are decorated with astrologers and scientists from Russia and former soviet states, and you can just feel the good intentions of the metro-station designers. Let’s get these school children pumped up about science!!!

Cosmonaut Vladimir Aleksandrovich Dzhanibekov adorns the walls of the Tashkent metro.

The space theme is pretty amazing.

Look at those light fixtures!!! I wish I could loot them.

Wandering the empty city and taking the empty (but fancy) metro made us happy we had only one day in Tashkent. The next morning, we caught a train up to the rural area of Fergana valley to continue our adventure.

I have mixed feelings about our time in Georgia. On one hand we had excellent bread, wine, and fizzy water, which sounds very biblical. People were immensely friendly and the crumbling architecture of Tbilisi makes for one of the most interesting urban environments I’ve ever seen. On the other hand, much of the food is greasy and meat-centric, nearly every tourist attraction includes either precipitous heights or taxidermy (maybe a Jaynie-specific gripe), and life maintenance chores necessary for long term travelers (like us) were difficult. Laundry, haircuts, and printing documents turned into full day escapades. (related side bar: Jeff thinks his new Georgian haircut makes him look like a Russian boy-toy. I don’t disagree but he looks cute. Also, don’t Google ‘Russian boy-toy’.)

The Good Stuff

Tbilisi dates back to about 500 AD, but constant invasions destroyed the ancient city and what you see today was built in the early 1800s. Most of the civic architecture is Art Nouveau style – pretty but a bit dull. The residential architecture, however, is fascinating. Winding streets are lined with houses made of a chaotic jumble of styles, looking like Damascus, Istanbul, and Sarajevo had a baby. Many houses are brick (thus the crumbliness) and have cantilevered wooden balconies that are elaborately carved and hanging on by a thread. Built around a central courtyard to house large, multigenerational families, they now house three or four flats. Sadly, years of seismic activity and negligence have left these structures beyond repair. Metal braces stabilize the most impaired structures, but I think these houses are destined to be demolished.

Inside a crumbing Tbilisi house.

This neighborhood was amazing. They’ve buttressed the walls with metal braces, but I think they’re beyond repair.

Another house in that neighborhood. Look at the wooden balcony…. I love it.

A super funky staircase. I’m pretty sure it can’t support weight.

A view along one of the main streets to the Narikala fort.

The cable car to the top of Narikala Fort. See what I mean about precipitous heights?

After the architecture, the best thing about Georgia is the bread. I will be dreaming about this stuff for the rest of my life. The most common bread is a nice chewy leaven bread called ‘shotis puri’, or just ‘shoti’. Shoti is baked by slapping the dough on the inside wall of a coal filled tandoor-like oven called a tone. Every street has a baker, and they sell their goods out of basement-level windows for 20-50 cents. Our nightly dinner was a loaf (or two) of shoti and homemade cheese sold by street vendors (sometimes good, sometimes scary).

Here’s a nice hot tone with some shoti on the walls.

The bread bakes pretty quickly- just 10 minutes or so.

A nice close up. This makes me hungry…

This is how you order bread…

Just one. Okay, I took two.

Great success with my shoti.

Georgian wine is another highlight, and the country has an 8,000-year legacy of wine making. Georgian wine differs from ‘European style’ wine in two distinct ways: 1) grape skins are not filtered from the juice, and 2) fermentation happens in buried clay jugs called ‘kvevris’. We did a food and wine tour to the Kakheti region west of Tbilisi, and it was definitely our favorite part of the trip to Georgia. The scenery in Kakheti is absolutely stunning, and seeing the old methods of wine making was interesting. Oh, and we saw some kittens (yay yay yay!!!!), so of course we loved Kakheti.

Our new Georgian BFF with armful of kittens. Could anything be better?

Jeff and I with our new babies. I hope Kip and Kevin don’t see this…

Nah, I didn’t love this.

Look at those two… so cute.

As part of our wine tour we visited a small family run winery, several delightful rural food vendors, and most excitingly – a wine cellar owned by a pair of Russian oligarchs and housed in a former Soviet missile bunker. This bunker-cum-cellar was huge, and it contained 8km worth of tunnels. The temperature inside the tunnels was 30 degrees cooler than outside, and we were outfitted with very undignified snuggies to keep us comfortable. Of course, the fact that the wine caves are a former Soviet bunker was not mentioned during our tunnel tour. Sure, there are a lot of reasons for 8 km of Cold War-era tunnels in a granite mountain bordering Chechnya….

The buried clay ‘kvevri’ for fermenting wine. Each kvevri holds around 800 L of wine, so these things are big.

Here’s an old kvevri in its entirety.

After use, the fermentation vessels are cleaned with the bark of a cherry tree.

Lots of wine and preserved fruits.

Soviet bunker wine cellar!!! Evidently those glass pipes on the ceiling used to transport the wine… but then they realized how hard cleaning them would be.

Some non-gross meat dumplings we had on our food and wine tour.

We visited an old house museum in Kakheti with some pretty cool old stuff. I’d love a Cyrillic typewriter.

Amazing old radios and TVs in Kakheti.

Churchkhela for sale on the street. They look like candles, but they’re actually nuts rolled in fruit pulp. They’re super tasty.

The view from the mountains in Kakheti. It was stunning.

The Bad Stuff (aka Soviet weirdness)

Sadly, not all of the Soviet holdovers in Georgia are as fun as bunker-wineries. As I mentioned, the food in Georgia is very meat-centric, and in all too many cases very Russian. On our first morning, we decided to go for a cheap brekky at a popular local joint known for chebureki (essentially a hand pie). We ordered meat chebureki and potato dumplings, and the food was literally meat chebureki and potato dumplings. No herbs, no spices, no accouterment. A pinch of chives or green onion would have done wonders, but sadly нет (I’ll save you from Googling; that means ‘no’ in Ruski). This food experience repeated itself several times over, and was frustrating since I know Georgians are capable of growing herbs. Why the bland food??? My theory is that is was for Russian tourists, but it made dining out fairly unpleasant.

More Russian-ness happened at the Tbilisi baths. The city is known for its historic sulfur baths, and I delightedly ran to the baths on Day 1. Sadly, rather than the festive shvitz I anticipated, what I found was very staid and very, very Russian. Despite what the internet will tell you, the baths in Tbilisi are not public bath houses, but private rooms with a bath. The rooms are super big, and furnished with icky pleather couches evocative of a brothel. The whole thing reeks of cigarettes, vodka, and beer. See? Super Russian. I did get a very nice scrub down by a no-nonsense attendant and was offered a massage by a male masseur, which I kindly declined. A bit weird? Yes. But these baths just weren’t up to my excitement standards (which admittedly are high after the electric baths in Japan).

This is where you get scrubbed. After the scrub, they throw buckets of hot water on you, which is the best part.

Here is the actual bath. It comes from a natural hot spring so it’s super stinky and very hot.

The atmospheric changing area.

The ‘relax’ area next to the bath… I wish I could capture a smell with this.

A final Soviet throwback I’ll leave with was our adventure in the Tbilisi metro system. Jeff and I though we’d take the subway to another part of the city for some exploration, a nice easy day. Fun. We bough our tickets, we entered the station, and we were met with the most terrifying subway I have ever encountered. I cannot emphasize this enough – this subway is DEEP!!!! Terrifyingly deep!!!! The Rustaveli Metro station is 200 feet underground, and you reach the platform by a single escalator that is 400 feet long. I didn’t know it at the time, but this is one of the longest escalators in the world (good on you, USSR). And it’s fast. Like, uncomfortably fast. The Soviets built metro systems deep enough to survive nuclear holocaust, but they certainly didn’t think about passenger experience. You feel like you’re descending into a pit mine, and if you don’t physically hold on to both railings you’ll tip over. It was petrifying, and after our 3-minute descent we were frightened and immediately began our ascent.

So there you have it – the good with the Soviet bad. For the most part, we enjoyed our time in Georgia and it was good to try out a ‘baby-former Soviet state’ before heading to Uzbekistan. Next up – Oʻzbekiston Respublikasi.

… not the name of a cocktail, but it should be

The CNN travel desk is doing all of the legwork for us. I shouldn’t even bother writing the blog anymore. As Jeff and I prepare for Uzbekistan, we saw this:

6 Silk Road secrets: Traveling in Central Asia’s Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan

So my take away from this article is that 1) we’re definitely going to the best ‘Stan, and 2) the food is going to be as grim or worse than we’re expecting. We harbor no delusions that Uzbek food will be a highlight, but the “what to expect in Uzbekistan” bullet points email to us by our Uzbek minder is disheartening. Nearly EVERY food item described in the “Food Specialties” section includes mutton, goat, or both and is followed the ominous epitaph “usually topped with shredded horse meat”…. Oh boy.

The CNN article confirms these concerns.

Of the grand bazar in Tashkent, CNN says:

A gargantuan dome that looks like the ultimate piece of Soviet space age era fantasy, the interior is designed in concentric circles lined with merchants selling typically Uzbek carnivorous cuts including horse sausage, sheep’s lungs, mutton, goat and camel meat, huge skewers of kebab meat and pies made with the fat from a sheep’s rump.

Oh yeah, Jeff and I love nothing more than a sheep’s rump fat pie and camel meat for dinner. Mmmm. Of the ‘Stan cuisine in general, CNN says:

[There is] not a vegetable or salad in sight.

This should be good.

We loved Lebanon, but it was intense. Jeff has a theory that the Middle East would be peaceful if people cooled it a bit on the coffee. Perhaps a caffeine ‘sin tax’ is just the thing to spur a two-state solution? At any rate we were ready for a bit of relaxation in Cyprus after 10 days of grown man slap fights and street vendors chucking loose change at customers (but we still love you, Lebanon).

The flight from Beirut to Larnaca, Cyprus is 20 minutes so the firmly European-feel of Cyprus was striking and somewhat unexpected. We stayed in a rural area outside of the village of Kiti, and we couldn’t have asked for a more pleasant home base. Our flat had an amazing terrace that overlooked farmland on the west and the Mediterranean on the east. We spent the entire week at home looking at the sea and eating home grown olives, apricots, and eggs. Oh, and we made our first (and probably last) dog friend of the trip – and adorable mutt named Snoopy.

Jeff fell in love with him immediately.

And Jeff isn’t even a dog person!!!

Okay, how cute is Snoopy???

I loved him too.

Here is our view out to the Mediterranean.

Sun rise on our terrace was so magical!

And the yogurt was amazing- I will learn how to make it.

I was obsessed with making Cypriot brekky.

Harvesting apricots with Tommy- the best AirBnb host ever.

We were remarkably lazy in Cyprus, but we did go on a few adventures around the island.

Nicosia

Cyprus is a large island in the Eastern Mediterranean and over the millennia it has been under the rule of Greeks, Romans, Venetians, the Crusaders, the Ottomans, and the British – so yeah, there’s some history. Not surprisingly, this history has left a blend of cultures on the island, and in the middle part of the 20^th century tensions between Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots spilled over into a civil war. In 1974 Turkey invaded the northern part of Cyprus and the island was divided in two, with the majority Greek Republic of Cyprus in the south and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) in the north. The TRNC is recognized only by Turkey and remains a bit of a rogue state, so that was fun for us.

Nicosia is the capital city of both the Republic of Cyprus and the TRNC, which makes it the last divided capitol on earth. Nicosia has made a bit of a tourist attraction of being the last divided capitol on earth, and Jeff and I decided to make a day trip across the ‘Green Zone’ to spend an afternoon in Turkey. The Greek side of Nicosia was quite modern, and felt like a normal small-ish European city. As we made our way toward the border crossing at Ledra Street, however, things got a bit creepy. It doesn’t feel dangerous or anything, but you get a sense that that you’re entering an economic dead zone and many of the storefronts look like they have been abandoned since 1974.

Crossing the Greek side of the Ledra Street crossing.

Some graffiti in the UN Buffer Zone.

An arial view of the city of Nicosia. You can see the walls of the old cit and the Green Line down the middle.

The actual border crossing is very straightforward and only took about 5 minutes: a check on the Cyprus “Greek” side, walking across the barren UN buffer no-man’s land, and a check on the Turkish side. Our timing couldn’t have been more perfect – the moment we crossed over to the Turkish side we heard the call to prayer. We saw barbed wire, sand bags, bored soldiers drinking tea, and cats everywhere… Yeah, we’re back in the Middle East.

Sand barrels!!! Oh, we’ve missed you Middle East.

The flags of Turkey (left) and TRNC (right) flying over an Ottoman market.

Welcome to Turkey!

Because they’re a contested state, the TRNC is trying really, really hard to be legitimate. They make a stink about accepting euros even though they know full well we tourists don’t have Turkish lira, and the Turkish and TRNC flags are everywhere. Okay, okay, I accept your legitimacy (except I really don’t). Exploring the old part of Turkish Nicosia was a treat, and we did some shopping at the Büyük Han, which was the largest caravanserai in Cyprus. The restored Han is now a tourist shopping area and gallery, and it was interesting to see a bit of Cyprus’s Ottoman legacy since the Greek side has cleanly erased these reminders.

After wandering the old streets and eating doner kebab, we took a bus from Nicosia to Kyrenia. Kyrenia is on the coast, and is described as the jewel of the TRNC, and it has a cool castle that has been used by the Romans, the Venetians, the Crusaders, and the Ottomans. There are also some ominous rah-rah Turkey statues and streets named ‘Atatürk’ and ‘Erdoğan’ just in case you forgot you’re in Turkey.

You’re in Turkey, damn it!!!

The walls of Kyrenia Castle.

A view of the port in Kyrenia from the castle.

Pafos

In addition to visiting the TRNC, we also spent a day exploring some Greek and Roman ruins in the southern city of Pafos. Legend has it that Pafos was the birthplace of Aphrodite, and today it’s a cute and easy to navigate tourist city. There are quite a few archeological sites in Pafos, and one of the more interesting ones is a site called the Tomb of the Kings. The tombs date to the 4^th century BC and are carved directly into the native rock. Some of the tombs look like the ‘pigeon-house’ tombs that we saw in Tyre, Lebanon, and it’s pretty fun to get to climb all over the tombs.

A tomb in the Kings Tombs archeological site.

The entrance to one of the large tombs.

The remains of one of the less-preserved tombs.

Another crumbing tomb.

The real treat in Pafos, however, are the mosaics housed in the main Pafos archeological park. The park contains the remains of several private homes from the Roman era, the House of Theseus and the House of Dionysus being the largest and best preserved. They have the most spectacular mosaics that I’ve ever seen, and now I’m going to get into mosaic making… It will happen. We capped off our day in Pafos by visiting a traditional taverna for a lovely lunch of meze. (side bar: it’s a good sign if the guy manning the grill is shirtless. A really good sign.)

I can’t believe how elaborate this is.

The blue on this was incredible.

I got so many fun design ideas.

So, so many.

This was a mosaic ‘prototype’ made from round pebbles rather than tiles.

After our week of relaxing, eating cheese, and lazily exploring easy tourist sites, we didn’t want to leave Cyprus. It was a nice respite in our travels, and we braced ourselves for our upcoming slog through the former Soviet states…

Hummus, History, and Hezbollah

Our final destination in Lebanon was a 3-day stop in Tyre, also known as Sour (pronounced Sur). The city is in Lebanon’s deep south and few tourists make it to Tyre, most likely due to its alarming proximity to Israel. As luck would have it our favorite Lebanese restaurateur in Salt Lake City is a Tyrian (that is really what they’re called), and when we mentioned to Ali that we’d be visiting Tyre he generously set us up with his mama and brother, Nasser. Don’t you just love Lebanese hospitality?

The road to Tyre

Accommodation secured, we needed to figure out transport to Tyre. Nasser told us that a taxi from Beirut would cost $100 US, which really annoyed us for a 1.5 hour drive. Emboldened by our public bus to Byblos, we decided to find a bus to Tyre. How hard could it be with roughly 88 lbs of baggage? There are neither bus stations nor bus schedules in Beirut, so making this happen was a little tricky. We found a tip online saying that buses south stop at something called ‘Cola Station’, so that’s where we headed. It turns out that ‘station’ means ‘kind-of-a-curb-where-some-buses-are’, and after our taxi dumped us at Cola we had to figure out our options.

“Going to Tyre? Tyre?” we asked every bus driver. “No,” most of the drivers responded. Except for one guy. He said ‘no’, but after thinking about it for a second, he decided ‘yes’. Hummm, we were suspicious but we were also hot, so we loaded our selves and our exorbitant baggage onto his bus. One downside of this bus was that everyone smoked, but one upside was that the doors were broken and didn’t close. So… win?

As we headed south, we began to sense that the cultural landscape had changed. We no longer saw glossy commercial billboards, and saw an increasing abundance of yellow flags emblemized with green AK-47s. Wait a second… are those Hezbollah flags? Yep, and the further south we drive the more Hezbollah-y things got. The flags were everywhere. Lining the streets, hanging from apartment buildings, and in front of otherwise inviting cafes. Many of the cars we saw had sweet windshield wraps with dramatic stylized images of machine guns, ayotellah-esque figures, and fierce looking young men in fatigues. In addition to the welcoming iconography, we started seeing rugged SUVs with UN seals on the side. Oh fun, UN peacekeepers AND Hezbollah! Welcome to the south.

Welcome to Lebanon’s south!

We played a game of ‘spot the Hezbollah flag’. I love that they’re waving with the Lebanese flag.

The roads are peppered with bilboards like this.

We saw lots of these driving around Tyre.

They aren’t too subtle with the iconography, are they?

Here’s a sweet gem on the back of this great old mercedes wagon.

The drive was slow, and when we reached the halfway point of Sidon we were told to get off the bus. Yep, that’s what I suspected – NOT a bus to Tyre. After asking about 100 people, we figured out that there is another bus that would take us to Tyre, but of course the bus was like 5 blocks away. Fine. We schlepped our way to the bus, which was really more of a van, let’s be honest, and got settled for our very up-close tour of small southern towns in Lebanon.

At first the bus seemed spacious. This could work!

And then this happened. It was like a normal sized van but it had 5 rows of seats….

But we enjoyed ourselves.

As we approached Tyre, Nasser called us, rightfully disturbed that we were now 3 hours into what should be a 1.5-hour journey. Since there are no bus stations in Tyre, we needed to arrange where to meet him. “Just tell the driver to drop you at Mahatta Joudi!!! Mahatta Joudi!!!!” I’m really bad with languages, so I usually come up with a visual mnemonic to remember foreign words. This one was easy – I just pictured the baby of Mahatma Gandhi and Judge Judy, which in my imagination was even less cute than it sounds. Great, now I’ll never forget where to have the bus take me in Tyre.

Nasser took us to his mom’s house, and Mrs. Sabah took wonderful care of us. On the night of our arrival Mrs. Sabah cooked us a lovely dinner of roasted chicken and vegetables, and after so much time on the road a home cooked meal was amazing. Both Jeff and I loved – LOVED – getting to stay in a neighborhood in Tyre rather than a hotel. We’re fairly certain that there was a Hezbollah training camp down the street from Mrs. Sabah’s home, but we played it cool like everyone else. As Jeff put it, “People are acting like Hezbollah training camps are as normal as Starbucks.” Well, I guess here they kind of are. Yeah, we see this stuff all the time….

Us with Mrs. Sabah and her helper Shume.

Home cooked food!!! We loved it.

Exploring Tyre

Ancient Tyre was a Phoenician port-city renowned for the manufacture and export of uniquely transparent glass and ‘murex’, a fabulously expensive purple dye made from snails. At its height around the 10^th century BC, these exports helped to make Tyre one of the richest cities in the ancient world. The archeological sites are huge and you could easily spend several days exploring them. Nasser was kind enough to connect us with a local guide, Hassan, to help us navigate the sprawling ruins for a day. Hassan is an archeologist by trade, and knows a LOT about Tyre’s archeological sites. Like, kind of too much sometimes, but we definitely got an education.

There are two main areas of archeological sites in Tyre: al-Mina (the ancient port) and al-Bass (the Necropolis). We started out at al-Mina to explore the ancient city and port. Excavations are ongoing (inshallah, finances willing), but much of the central port area has been excavated. The view from the central road is striking: massive, pink Aswan marble columns and leading down to the Mediterranean and a sprawling city on either side. Tyre was so wealthy that this road was actually paved in mosaic tile, and many of the mosaics have been restored. On either side of this main road excavations continue, with a residential area on one side and glorious public bath system on the other. It seems like the baths comprised half of the area of the city, which would have been fine by me. Hassan told us that people would spend an entire day at the baths, and that they had libraries, dining options, and places to nap in addition to baths and steam rooms. I really should have been born a rich Roman.

The central street in the port area of ancient Tyre.

A view from the residential area of al-Mina.

This is the theater. There was a swimming pool in the middle so they did some kind of water show here.

This little guy was wandering near the ruins.

A view across the ruins to modern day Tyre.

This is a really massive site.

After like 4 hours in the blistering sun we were exhausted, but Hassan had oh so much more to show us. After ‘relaxing’ with an apple and a thimble full of water, we headed to the Necropolis at the al-Bass site, which is larger but but less excavated than al-Mina. Our exhaustion aside, the site really was spectacular. In addition to tombs in the Necropolis the site houses an amazingly well preserved Roman aqueduct, an impressive 20 meter high arch erected for the emperor Hadrian in 130 AD, and my favorite thing – a hippodrome for chariot races. The hippodrome was enormous, and our pictures don’t do it justice. Some of the ‘bleacher style’ seating has been restored and it is estimated to have held over 30,000 people. All around the hippodrome track are the ruins of small rooms that would have been concessions vendors for the attendees – there are probably 100 in total. It’s not that hard to imagining this site in full swing, and it makes you realize what a privilege it was to be a citizen of the Roman empire.

These pictures don’t even do it justice. Just imagine the incredible chariot races here.

Some sarcophagi in the necropolis at al-Bass.

An inscription near the gymnasium, celebrating the victory of a Tyrian wrestler. You can make out ‘Tyrian’ on the third row.

One of the many amazing mosaics.

A geometric marble mosaic.

The walkway under what would have been the bleachers at the hippodrome.

The view from the bleachers.

After like 8 hours in the blistering sun, we negotiated our release from Hassan. Exhausted and sunburnt, we made our way to a nearby restaurant called Abou Deeb to nurse our wounds. Luckily for us, Abou Deeb turned out to be fabulous, and we ate some of the best hummus we’d had on the trip. Abou Deeb saved the day!!! Fortified and fully human again, we spent the rest of the day wandering the twisty streets of Tyre’s old city and souqs.

Abou Deeb was delicious.

Shawarma to the rescue.

Tyre’s old quarters.

We had a good time shopping.

There were lots of god trinkets. We were tempted…

The next day, we headed back to Mahattah Joudi (aka Mahatma ‘Judge’ Judy) and slowly made our way back to Beirut for a flight to Cyprus. Tyre was a great adventure for us. We saw more UN peacekeepers than tourists, but alhamd lillah (thanks be to god) we got to enjoy tasty food, amazing sites, and some genuine Lebanese hospitality. Thus concluded our adventures of humus, history, and Hezbollah. Until the next time, Middle East!!!