A Dignified Entrance to the Historic City of Tyre

“Where does the motorway end?” I say, for the third time.

I mean, clearly the motorway HAS ended.

I’ve just driven through a checkpoint manned by South Korean soldiers and adorned with signs about the glory of Korea and petrol cans full of concrete decorated with the Lebanese cedar flag to find the road terminating at a grassy bank.

But it wasn’t supposed to end here. And, yet again, my 11-year-old navigator is failing to deliver.

“That depends what you mean,” Z says. “We need to get the coast road.”

“This IS the coast road. The motorway IS the coast road,” I say, irritably. “LOOK AT THE MAP. The blue and white thing,” I hiss, ignoring Luke Skywalker in the X5 behind me, who’s making like our car is Princess Leia before Obi Wan Kenobi spilled his guts.

“The COAST ROAD. Does it reach Tyre? Or have we overshot? I can’t stop on this road. You need to MAP-READ.”

“Yes, the ‘blue and white thing’ DOES reach Tyre, and, as I told you last time, it goes all the way to Naqoura and the Israeli border,” my son says, dripping venom from every audible quotation mark. “But, the ‘blue and white thing’ is a motorway UNDER CONSTRUCTION. So we need to take the coast road. That’s the red road.”

“Oh,” I say, feebly. “Did you look at the key?”

“Yes,” he says. “I couldn’t work out what was going on, so I looked at the key.”

“Oh,” I say. “Well done!”

And they say kids learn nothing from travel!

We drive blind for a couple of k until I hit a T-junction and the guy behind me overtakes without so much as a flash of his hazards to tell me to f*ck off.

Which is nice of him. I don’t think I’d have been so charitable in the circs.

But I have no idea which way the coast is from here, the moon is up, and at just a few miles from the Israeli and Syrian borders, I’m not inclined to take a guess.

Roadtripping Lebanon is bracing enough without coping with chaps driving without lights, on their phones and out of their skulls in the dark, not to mention checkpoints that have put up their catsclaws for the night and are feeling a little bit jumpy about Syrian insurgents.

So I slap my hazards on, roll the window down, and ask the next chap in a pickup who bothers to slow down to check for oncoming traffic, “Sour?”

That’s Lebanese for Tyre, the home of Tyrian purple, the birthplace of Dido, and our destination for the evening.

He spews some rapid Arabic, makes some hand gestures and points me left.

This road is wide enough for three lanes of traffic in many parts of the world, two in Australia, so five in Lebanon, but has no lines on it, which means that at any given point there could be four people overtaking each other simultaneously.

Something’s on my outside.

It’s the pickup! Now, in many parts of the world, I’d feel threatened by this. But here I just slow to a crawl, wind my window down, slap my hazards on and look at him enquiringly.

“Straight on!” he says in Arabic. “Then left at the end.”

He chucks in some hand gestures to make it even clearer as we crawl along. Two vehicles overtake, simultaneously. And then he U-turns back the way he came, having completed his good Samaritan act for the day.

Another thing I love about Lebanon? The Lebanese are TOTALLY helpful.

And, unlike the helpful Lebanese who’ve been taking us on 100kph magical mystery tours of the Chouf because they want to help me out with directions, usually concluding at an army checkpoint or a garage where there might be someone who knows, THIS Lebanese actually knows the way!

Result!

Lebanon is a small country, but a mountainous one, and we have covered a lot of miles today and I am, well, tyred. (Sorry!)

We’ve inspected the taxidermy at Moussa Castle, pootled around Hezbollahland, and what was supposed to be a straightforward 30 minutes on the motorway to Tyre – that’s the Tyre of Homer, Virgil, the Old Testament – has turned into yet another sodding mystery tour.

“Well,” I say, as we emerge from a stretch of polythene farm tunnels and mechanics into some rather scruffy-looking suburbs. “This has to be Tyre! Look! It has a mall! Ooh! They do kid’s sandals! Do you think they’ll have some in a size 37?”

Silence. Z has resigned himself to arriving in Paris in sandals held together with superglue. Me? Well, it seems a little harsh for his poor dad to have to do the shopping, plus it’s not really a good look pour moi.

“Look!” says Z. “There’s a Burger King Drivethrough!”

“No,” I say. “We need to find where we’re staying! Anyway, I’m not eating Burger King in Lebanon. The food’s too good.”

“But it’s a drivethrough!”

“NO!”

A roundabout. Aaarrggghhh!

These things just spring out at you in Lebanon. They sign sharp bends from time to time, but intersections and roundabouts don’t seem to be worth flagging.

“Look at the map!” I say. “The guidebook map, and the map map. That sticky out promontory up there looks like it might be the old city. What do you reckon?”

“It’s on the coast,” Z says.

“Yeah,” I say. “I’ll just follow the coast and we should hit the old port.”

I have a good feeling about Tyre. Most governments recommend you don’t visit it, partly because of terrorism but mainly because it’s in the Israeli border zone that’s policed by UNIFIL peacekeepers and if Israel and Hezbollah do get their respective knickers in a twist again it could be difficult to get out.

And Z, who’s been itching for a Caramel Frappuccino for his last proper breakfast in Lebanon and is convinced that there won’t be a frappuccino anywhere outside Beirut, is warming to it rapidly.

We pootle rapidly along an expansive Mediterranean corniche that narrows into a little portside way and a charming little fishing port.

A charming little PHOENICIAN fishing port, no less.

“Do you reckon I can get through there?” I say.

We’re outside a couple of little restaurants, only, I figure, a few hundred metres from the place where we intend to stay.

There’s a Merc parked on one side and a rattletrap on the other, but it’s a little car, so we make it through just fine.

And then…

Oh f*ck! They’re rebuilding the road. And, there’s a car coming at me. This means only one thing.

Reversing. In a right-hand drive car.

Through a tight space with an expensive car in it and another one coming at me head-on and the omnipresent threat of ending up in the harbour (I’ve seen this happen twice in Asia, both with motorbikes, but all the same…)

REVERSING. In a brand new hire car that I’m supposed to give back, unmarked, the day after tomorrow.

Nope. Not gonna do it. Gonna sit here and play dumb until HE reverses.

Obviously, he’s not moving. He ain’t going nowhere.

A collection of chaps begin to make helpful (and, so far as I can tell, polite) lady driver hand gestures, along the lines of “Come back, come back, come back!”

Now, much as I moan about gender stereotypes, I would actually agree that, while most women drivers are better at avoiding moving vehicles than most male drivers, we are collectively much, much worse at scraping things that are sitting quietly behind us or off to one side, like, y’know, walls, and harbours, and concrete planters full of flowers, and brand new Mercedes.

In fact, I would be beyond happy if I could just throw the f*cking keys at someone with a Y chromosome and ask him to do it for me. Where is valet parking when you need it?

Honestly, anything more sophisticated than reversing into something to turn round, going straight back the way I came, or parallel parking in a substantial space with minimum pressure, fills me with absolute terror. It’s just…

…It’s going backwards! And you have to look at things backwards in the mirrors! And they’re never in the place they look as though they’re in. And your wheels don’t behave the same way they do when you’re going forward!

And it’s a righthand drive car. So everything’s in the WRONG PLACE.

OK, maybe that’s just me…

“You can’t go through there,” says a chap outside the restaurant in French. “You need to come back.”

“I know,” I say, pulling out my finest Franglais for the occasion. “Je déteste le parking! Je n’aime pas rouler en revers! C’est horrible!”

Z, I observe, is visibly cringing. Only five years to go, and he’ll be able to park the car for me!

In fact, he’d probably do a better job at it even now, what with knowing his left from his right and having a Y chromosome, and all…

“Straight back,” the chap says, in French. “Allez, allez, allez… Tournez! Peu plus, peu plus! Arretez!…”

Oh, thank god, I think, as I snuggle in between two parked cars, following his precise instructions.

I’m out of the way of the car. And he’s such a nice helpful chap.

I’ll have to get out of here in the morning, but tomorrow’s another day.

“Allez, allez, allez!” say the other guys.

So I can’t park here? B*gger.

I don’t see WHY I can’t park here, given the Lebanese seem to park anywhere they bloody feel like, but apparently there are some rules.

So now I have to park the sodding thing without hitting any of the four vehicles in easy striking range, any of a range of pedestrians, or, for that matter, landing up in the harbour, the flower planter, the lamp post or the anti-martyr concrete block affair.

With an audience of approximately eight guys, all giving me directions and clearly finding the whole thing absolutely hilarious, it’s almost worse than the road to the lake of farts.

I can’t just throw my keys at one of them and plead with him to park it for me because a) that would be childish and b) he might put it somewhere so cunningly tight that I manage to hit something on the way out.

I need to grow a pair and park the goddamn car, BUT I am starting at an angle rather than parallel to the car, so I can’t use my usual method of lining up with the indicators to tell me when to engage full lock.

At least all my guys agree, which is good (one time in Bali a chap directed me, mercifully slowly, into a tree, rather tarnishing my faith in male directions). “Allez! Allez! Allez!”

“Full lock,” they indicate.

“Straighten up!”

There is some banter and much laughter, in which I participate.

I am female. I am a tourist. I am in a hire car. And I am signally failing to park it.

That is, whatever country you are in, intrinsically hilarious.

At least I’m not blonde any longer, I think.

Z, I notice, is crimson.

Excellent! I think. I’m almost there!

And then I can get out of this car and never look at it again.

It is only when we are actually out of the car and I am babbling embarrassed thanks in three languages while facepalming vigorously that I realise I had about three metres space behind me and have parked right up the arse of the rattletrap.

Well, I say “parked”.

The Indonesian language has a series of increasingly transitive verbs (“I sleep”, “I go to sleep”, “I put the baby down to sleep”), and I guess I’m looking for something close to “I have been put into the parking place”…

Yep. My parking is so execrably bad it needs a whole new language to describe it.

“Mum,” says Z. “That is the most embarrassed I think I’ve ever been in my entire life.”

“I know,” I say, laughing. “Have you seen the size of the space? I could have parked a bloody bus in there. Even me! Bwahahahaha!”