From Baalbek we drove an hour or so south to Anjar to visit the ruins of a royal Umayyad city.
On the way to Anjar we went through the town of Riyaq, which for a time was a major transportation hub along the Damascus-Beirut railway and with an airport originally built by the Germans during World War I. Nowadays it hosts a base for the Lebanese air force.
We also passed more refugee camps, farms, and sheep herds. In the photos below, besides the sheep, you can see glimpses of the UNHCR tarps that are ubiquitous in the refugee camps.
Our guide, the Armenian archaeologist, is actively working at the Anjar site, so it was pretty cool to have him tour us around.
The Umayyad dynasty ruled much of the Arab world in the 7th-8th century CE from Damascus, and Anjar was built as a summer getaway by Caliph Walid Ibn Abd Al-Malak. It is only a few hours from Damascus (about an hour by car nowadays) and at a higher, cooler elevation. It was also at the crossroads of the Damascus-Beirut and Homs-Tiberias trading routes. Archaelogists have done a lot of work over the last few decades excavating and reconstructing portions of the palace, city streets, shops, baths, and so on.
Our guide left us in Anjar, which is where he lives, and the driver took us to the largest population centre in the Bekaa valley (and third largest city in all of Lebanon), the Christian city of Zahle. Here, we ate a delicious lunch at Casino Arabi. It would be hard to list everything we ate, but it was standard Lebanese fare--hummus, baba ganouj. stuffed vine leaves, fattoush, various kebabs, and so on.
Our final tour stop was Lebanon's largest winery, just outside of Zahle.
We had a quick tour of the tunnels and cave here, where historically the Jesuit monks who started the winery aged and stored wine.
After the tour we were served some wine samples in the gorgeous bar upstairs. Overall the winery tour was a bit disappointing compared to some I have done in Canada, mostly because it felt rushed. But, it was still cool to get to see a Lebanese winery and sample Lebanese wines. Also, Chateau Ksara has one of the most . . . engaging? . . . websites I have ever visited: https://chateauksara.com/Intro/.
Back in Beirut we had a drink and watched sunset by the Pigeon Rocks.
After dinner, I was eager to figure out how to use Uber paying with cash (credit card would charge the official exchange rate for Lebanese pounds instead of the black market rate, and would therefore make any trip exorbitantly expensive). We decided to head to a bar on Beirut's famous Armenia Street, about 15 minutes across town. All went well with the Uber there and back (more or less, anyway; on the trip there the driver asked for more money than the app said, and seemed to suggest that Uber was behind on the exchange rate [this is quite possible given how quickly the rate changes, but I was not going to comply with paying more than the quoted price]), which was great because it will make our plans tomorrow much easier if we can reliably use Uber.
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