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Leaving Lebanon (part two)
Returning back to Beirut under a heavy cloud of defeat, the cold, stark reality of my predicament set in. The road to Jordan was now firmly closed and any glimmer of hope in hopping onto a container ship to Egypt had faded days ago after going on a wild goose chase from one shipping company to the next to see if any of them would accept me and the bike as ‘cargo’, all to no avail. My situation was such that I was effectively blackaded by land and sea. The irony of it all was that it was self-imposed. Robert Burns was spot on when he wrote that ‘the best…
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Bowed but Never Broken
There are about 4m citizens living in Lebanon (the last census was conducted in 1932 but hasn’t been revisited due to sectarian sensitivities) and a sizeable diaspora approximating 15-20m depending on who you ask. Largely as a result of the Lebanese tradition of traveling and its geographical position as a ‘gateway’ between the Middle East and Europe, Lebanon has one of the largest expatriate communities in the world per capita with more citizens living outside the country than are resident. But for those that do decide to stay (or have no choice), the majority choose to live in Beirut. The city is chic, beautiful, dirty, noisy, ugly, fragrant, fast, and…