Exploring Tyre Old Town

Given the chap with the moustache has offered intensive, and, further, only discreetly amused assistance in my parking fiasco, I feel we should eat in his restaurant.

But first we need to find somewhere to stay. The guidebook recommends Al Fanar, up by the lighthouse, so I figure we’ll wander up that way.

“Do you know where Al Fanar is?” I ask the chap with the moustache, who, it emerges, is German.

“Sure,” he says. “It’s up past the lighthouse. But we have a room here if you would like to look at them…”

It’s a nicely decorated restaurant. Clean, slick lines, what looks like fake Phoenician statuary on the back wall, but classy fakes, and none of the kitsch you’d typically get in a portside restaurant. The pricing looks good. And they’re lovely folk.

“I’d love to,” I say. “How much?”

Some confab with his Lebanese boss, Elio. “$60,” he says, rather nervously. “It’s in the old town, over my house.”

“OK,” I say. “Let’s take a look…”

We wander along the little fishing port and into the narrow streets of the Christian district of the old town, with its arched windows, churches, some buildings already carpentered and pastel-painted, others still bomb-damaged from the 2006 war with Israel.

While Tyre Old Town is less chocolate box pretty than the medinas of either Byblos or Sidon, it is in some ways all the more interesting for it – in five years, if war doesn’t intervene, the whole thing will have been poshed up to Byblos-style perfection.

We pause to say hi to Elio’s wife: she is two years older than me, looks younger, and her oldest daughter is already married. For all its urbanity, Lebanese society remains in some ways quite traditional. 38, here, is really kinda old.

And we come to our “room”. A huge, glazed studio with two terraces, one at the front to watch the night fishing fleet go out, the second with views over flat roofs and ancient churches. We have sofas, a coffee-table, a dining table, a kitchenette, twin beds and a wetroom, all done out in dark woods. Result!

“Wow!” says Z.

“It’s lovely,” I say.

“How many nights?” Elio asks. We’re his first guests in this new venture.

“We only have one night,” I say. “Z’s flying out to England the morning after tomorrow to see his dad, and we need to be at the airport at 7am.”

I wish we could stay longer. We both wish we could stay longer. But all we have for Tyre is part of a day and then we need to be back in Beirut.

“This is basically his mancave, isn’t it?” says Z, after Elio has gone, “When I’m a man, I want a mancave JUST like this. With dark wood, and dark sofas, and a TV on a stand.”

The next morning we wander back through the old town to the port, which is lined with guys smoking, drinking coffee and mending their nets in a rather desultory fashion: it’s a Sunday, after all.

We’ve left Elio in peace, because he’s been working late, but he comes to find us — being neither Lebanese nor UNIFIL peacekeepers we stick out like a sore thumb in Tyre — and invites us to breakfast in his restaurant.

I take a bit more of a look at the fakes along the back wall. One of the sculptures, a glazed terracotta affair reminds me a lot of a sculpture we saw in Alexandria, its style indefinably, rather lumpenly, Phoenician.

“She’s a Phoenician queen, a queen of Tyre” Elio says, pointing to the marble bust beside it. “That’s Roman. The coins are a mixture of Roman and Phoenician.”

My god, I think. OF COURSE THEY’RE NOT FAKES. We’re in Lebanon!

Z and I pore over the coin collection, capturing one that we think is Julius Caesar, along with a pendant with the face of a longdead queen.

“Where did you find them?” I ask.

“Just out in the sea,” Elio says. “I have a tank, and dive with a tank, but at 3 metres, 5 metres, you find lots of coins, even in the harbour, so sometimes I dive without a tank. And there’s a place, 500m from here, where you can see the ruins of the Phoenician houses under the water, and swim over them, and find things.”

“I WANT TO DO THAT!” says Z.

“I know,” I say. “But it’s going to be like fossils. You’ll need to take time looking until you get used to spotting what you’re looking for.”

“Some fishermen found Phoenician gold out here,” explains Elio, himself a fisherman by trade. “The government took half, but they made $90,000.”

“THAT’s what I want to do,” says Z. “I want to come here, spend the week here, and go diving for treasure!”

Of course he does. Who wouldn’t?

“Let’s come back,” I say. “Let’s come back and spend a week here and go diving for treasure.”

We take a wander through the Old Town, Ottoman era streets lined with shops selling plastic flip-flops, spangly stilettos, sparkly handbags, mobile phones and kids’ toys, stalls selling sweet cherries, apricots, the green, furry fruit that hides crisply succulent fresh almonds, stopping at shoe shops to enquire about boys’ sandals, size 37.

Everyone is most insistent that the 36’s fit. They don’t.

Z will, having tried almost every kids’ shoes shops in Lebanon, be heading to London and Paris in Matalan sandals held together with superglue. Hey-ho.

The first set of ruins we come across, the Al-Mina site, would have wowed us, were it not for the fact that it’s not just Z who’s got ruin fatigue.

We inspect them in a rather desultory fashion.

“What’s that, Z?” I say, testing him.

“Hypocausts,” he says. “Colonnade. You know, I don’t really find Roman ruins all that interesting.”

“Mm…” I say. After the bright colours and narrative verve of some of the wonderful tombs we saw in Egypt, the scale of Petra, the complexity of Byblos, another Roman era settlement seems, well, a little bit dull. “But I still think we should see the hippodrome.”

“Why?” he says.

“Because Al-Bass has the biggest and best-preserved hippodrome in the whole world,” I say, “And we’re currently in walking distance of it so it would be stupid not to. AND there’s a triumphal arch.”

And — oh my! — it’s gorgeous. We walk down an avenue lined with jacaranda, bougainvillea, spring flowers and sarcophaguses, a necropolis that’s quite utterly lovely in the bright sunlight.

The triumphal arch appears ahead of us, a huge great thing, 20m high or so, built by Hadrian.

“Wow!” I say. “Look at the restoration on that! They did a brilliant job, didn’t they?”

“It’s been restored?!” says Z.

“’Zactly,” I say, smugly. “You would never know it had been restored.”

In general, Lebanese restoration jobs seem to be rather subtler than the style favoured by Egyptians and Jordanians, making their sites more rewarding to visit. Lebanese ruins feel like ruins. Just, good ruins.

A colonnaded avenue, home to shops and stalls, brings us to the formal entrance to the hippodrome.

“Imagine this,” I say. “Imagine coming through here on a race day, Blues versus Greens, the street full of people selling chickpeas and cups of wine, as many as ten thousand people pouring through the gates into the hippodrome – hey! Have you seen Ben Hur yet?!”

“What’s Ben Hur?” he asks.

“Historical epic,” I say. “Similar era to Spartacus and The Ten Commandments. It’s about chariot racing… ooh! Will you look at that?”

“Not much left of it, is there?” says Z.

Two sections of the stepped grandstand from which spectators would watch the races survive, as does one of the pillars the chariots would have turned around.

“There’s enough to see how big it was!” I say. “Look at it!”

We explore around the grandstands, the tunnels under them where stallholders sold their wares, and try and imagine how Tyre would have felt on a race day.

And then, too soon, it’s time to go. Back in our little car. Back to Beirut.

Where Z will head off to London, Paris, Broadstairs and Norfolk for some long-overdue time with his dad, three of his four grandparents and his friends, and I will be single, solo and bar reviewing in Beirut, then having a little writer’s retreat in Dahab.