Tales from Rohan

Monday in Acroyoga we tried the 3-Headed Dragon. Fortunately somebody had a camera.

Today I rented a bike. On my way somewhere else, I was riding by the Intercontinental Phoenician Hotel (the most expensive hotel in Beirut which is also home to parliament members and other big wigs that don’t want to get shot) and decided it would be fun to ride the bike in and have a look around. I went in the main entrance for cars. After explaining that I really was going into the hotel rather than around it, the guard cheerfully scanned my bike for explosives, then I waited for the crash barrier to retract, then I pulled up at the front door and the front door staff got the giggles. They all thought it was fantastic that I rode a bike to the Intercontinental and immediately offered me complimentary “valet parking”.

Next I went into the hotel, put my backpack through the x-ray machine and walked through the metal detector. Once inside I headed for the pool balcony to check out the view. The view is a bit surreal. There a bunch of very handsome new buildings intermixed with buildings which were obviously bombed, shelled, and shot to hell. Behind the Intercontinental and still visible from the pool is the husk of the Holiday Inn. In front are a few less famous buildings shot to hell, plus to a very exclusive yacht club in perfect shape.
I don’t know if this is the same yacht club, but the very popular former prime minister Rafiq Hariri and several of his aides and bodyguards were assassinated in front of the St George yacht club with a massive car bomb in February 2005, widely suspected to be the work of the Syrian government. A month later a million Lebanese protested in the main square (Martyr’s Square) demanding that Syrian troops leave Lebanon.

Holiday Inn with holes, Intercontinental in pink

View from the pool at the Intercontinental

Rafiq Hariri and other staff killed the same day

A million Lebanese marched a month later demanding Syria to pull its soldiers out of Lebanon

A few days ago, I went to the South of Lebanon. To go south of the Litani river (other than to the city of Tyre) you need to get special authorization from the police. Four of us took a taxi from our hotel for the day. The taxi driver speaks excellent French so we talked about various things throughout the trip. Before we left, I found out he was an ambulance driver for the Red Cross during the civil war.

First we went to Sidon (Saida) which is a quaint town with a small Crusader castle built sticking out into the sea. There was a Roman city here as well (and earlier) so the Crusaders used “leftover” pillars extensively as building material–not just as lintels and for structural support in the castle itself, but also in the sea wall.

Next we saw the remains of an old castle (Chateau Beaufort) on a knife ridge that was held by the Israeli army for a long time and finally destroyed by Hezbollah. After that we went to the town of Khiam. This town had a small prison on a hilltop that Hezbollah was using as a local base, and this is were Israel launched the first ground offensive during the 2006 war. I looked around for a while and I could not find a single building that had not been bombed in this village. Most houses were being completely rebuilt or extensively renovated. A few others still showed their shell damage. At this point in the trip, our driver told me that he grew up in this village and that his brother was a Hezbollah soldier who died in 2006.

Cluster bomb says “Made in USA”. Taxi driver’s brother is on the far left in the second row on the “martyrs poster”



After leaving the former prison, we drove along the border with Israel/Occupied Palestine and saw UNIFIL tanks and trucks all over the place. We stopped to talk to some Indonesian UNIFIL troops at an overlook and one of them asked to get a group shot (unfortunately mine was blurry).

Israeli flag The border Lebanese, Palestinian, and Hezbollah flags

UNIFIL is out in force

Finally we stopped in Tyre (Sour) and saw the ruins there, including the world’s largest hippodrome (420m long).

Intense.

When you discover that something has gone badly wrong I think it is nice to see if you can easily prevent the same thing from happening again. I noticed that all the banks in Lebanon are flourishing now. Come to find out that they had a rather more minor financial crisis a few years back and the government banned derivatives. Consequently, their banks are rock solid and turning a profit. Digging a little deeper past the knee-jerk reaction “just ban derivatives”, I ask why did banks get in such trouble with derivatives?  Because they didn’t know what they were really worth. There is no standardized accounting method for the derivatives that got all these banks into trouble. Banks get a bunch of special privileges and are regulated at minimum because ordinary deposits in banks are usually government insured. As a trade-off for the special benefit of receiving deposit insurance from the government I think it would be fair to say that banks cannot own or trade in any form of security for which there is a not an industry-wide accounting practice. You could even go so far as to restrict banks trading in securities which have an accounting method approved by a neutral-ish government agency like the very well-respected Government Accountability Office (GAO) in the US.

I am personally very curious what the balance sheet of every US bank would look like if the government just declared that the value of all “toxic securities” was officially zero until further notice and nobody was allowed to trade in them. Would any of the banks look OK if they didn’t have the liability of some of these derivatives? Would some banks look even worse? If there is nominal value still in these securities, the government could declare their ownership illegal, make loans based on the nominal value, and then forgive part of the repayment of these loans in exchange for the nominal value of the seized assets.

I want to shift gears and talk briefly about bankruptcy. The idea of bankruptcy is that it protects someone from their creditors. However this means that if those creditors traded fairly, they get screwed.  Perhaps a useful place for the government to step in and offer money is to offer *creditors* of bankrupt companies a grant or loan (free insurance perhaps) to cover their costs. My idea is that when the economy goes in the crapper, we should reward companies that were still in business doing something useful first. They should not be penalized for selling something to a deadbeat company. I would much rather see my taxpayer dollars go to this kind of creditor payment insurance than to a big bank that did something really dumb, or a big dumb reinsurance company….

I heard today that AIG executives were caught on camera having their second luxury retreat since after they received taxpayer bailout money to the tune of $150 Billion. The previous retreat, just days after the bailout and estimated to cost about half a million, was reported by NPR and ABC among others. Note that AIG currently has a market capitalization under $10 billion, but it needs a $85 billion bailout.

The Fed also said today that they would not use any of the $700 Billion bailout money approved by Congress to buy illiquid derivatives, “toxic” securities allegedly poisoning the financial system (which was the original motivation given for requesting the money). Not a single dollar of this money has been spent buying these “toxic securities”.

Since this brilliant bailout plan is working so well, I am not keen on bailing out US auto makers either. I would love to make sure that the employees still have a good job, but I don’t think these companies are going to do anything with the money other than throw good money after bad.

I went to the National Museum in Beirut today. This place has the best preserved early (Bronze Age through Roman Period) artifacts I have ever seen. The most amazing thing is that the museum was closed during the civil war and was heavily shelled (it was right on the Green Line separating the more Muslim West from the more Christian East). Before abandoning the museum, the staff packed away some small artifacts and poured giant slabs of concrete around some of the larger items (like sarcophogi) and burried the mosaics. The bulk of the medium sized artifacts were left down in the basement. Fifteen years later when the staff ventured down into the basement, they had to wear hazardous waste masks. The humidity in the basement was 92%. There was standing water everywhere and lots of bombs had exploded in the basement. Amazingly they managed to recover and restore a lot of amazing pieces.

Big Stuff:


Small artifacts that made it:

Some things that didn’t make it:

I left Syria a few days ago and I am in Beirut as I write this.  Like I did in Jordan, I rented a car for 3 days in Syria to see sights that are hard to get to. I found a French freelance journalist named Antoine and an Australian couple (Alan and Kate) to share the trip with me. All of them have traveled much more than I have and we are all in our 30s, so we had a lot to talk about (and a lot of open road during which to talk).

Our first day we drove from Aleppo to a castle overlooking the Northern Euphrates (Qala’at Najm). We had tea with the caretaker Albert’s family and then continued on to another castle (Qala’at Ja’abar) on Lake Assad. We slept in a big tent behind the castle restaurant and woke up with a wonderful view. Alan and I even went swimming in the lake. In both cases someone had to unlock or lock up the castle for us as we were the only visitors at Najm and the last visitors at Ja’abar.

The second day we went to Halayibba (where Queen Zenobia fled from Palmyra), and Dura Europos which was a truly enormous city which predated the Romans. It was forcibly evacuated by the Persians in the 600s and wasn’t found until the mid 1900s. We spent the night in Dier ez-Zoor and got invited to join a couple (John and Stella) for dinner who are Chaldean Christians. They had a really interesting perspective and it was great talking with them.

Dura Europos is about 40km from the border with Iraq. The US military attacked a town just over the border in Syria just two days later, killing several civilians. I was never in any direct danger, but it doesn’t exactly make we look benign or even harmless as an American.

Finally, our last day, we went to the museum in Dier ez-Zoor. The musuem probably had the best explanation of the progression of civilization in the fertile crescent that I had ever seen. I was especially interested in the progression of phonetic alphabets. Finally we got on the road to Qasr al-Hier ash-Sharqi. This place is seriously out in the middle of nowhere–38 km on a dirt road. The caretaker didn’t even bother to unlock the place for us, he just handed me the key and asked us to bring the key back when we were done. We met a family of Beduins on vacation who hung out with us, made us tea, gave Kate an incredibly vampy makeover, and offered us chicken. Unfortunately we had to get on the road. I dropped the others off in Palmyra, then I continued on toward Hama.

By this point I was driving by myself and it was quite dark. I was making pretty good time, but I wasn’t on the good road yet. It started to rain. When I was almost to the good road I came down a hill and hit a monster puddle, hydroplaned for several seconds and ended up just off the road in water about mid-calf deep. I waved down a truck driver and together we pushed the car onto the road and I got it started. I had to bail out the driver footwell which was full of red mud water. The rest of the drive was uneventful, but I was wondering how I was going to explain this to the rental car company. I was still wondering the next morning as I drove into Aleppo, but I found a car wash and vacuumed the remaining water out and had the car looking good as new when I dropped it off.

Enough driving for this trip!

I have tons of pictures from Petra, so it was hard to pick a few.

walking into Petra early in the morning…

entering the siq…

first glimpse of the Treasury

But wait, there are hundreds and hundreds of buildings 

exploring the tombs makes you feel a bit like Indiana Jones (really that’s my shadow)

But you really need to walk along one of the other siqs…

And get up on top of the rocks to appreciate your new vantage point

Palmyra (or Tadmoor to the locals) is an extensive, well-preserved Roman city in the middle of the Syrian desert. It was once an oasis along the route between Bagdad and Damascus.

I also caught a nice glimpse of a herd of (wild?) camels drinking at a watering hole from the bus window.

I have been in Damascus, Syria for a few days now. The old city is really cool–a maze of twisty passages that all look alike–and one that has been continuously inhabited for over 5000 years.

People here are generally very polite and friendly. I have had almost no negative reactions to being an American here, but I am definitely a pretty rare beast.  I have met one other person traveling on an American passport since I arrived here. It is a bit surreal to tell someone selling Hezbollah buttons that you are an American. In one way Syria is more relaxed than Jordan. There is a significant Christian population here, so there are quite a few night clubs, bars, and liquor stores, and more women who do not wear a hejab (headscarf).

Yesterday I read part of the Syria Today weekly news magazine in English. It had a surprisingly good (throrough, independent, and balanced) analysis of the possible affects of the US Election for Syrian foreign policy. It also had a report criticizing the government in its recent censorship of a Syrian soap opera that featured a freshly released policitcal prisoner. I guess the print media is more free than broadcast TV.

Sorry for the lack of photos this post, but it is 1am and I do not have my camera. Tomorrow I am off to Palmyra, then probably Homs, Hama, Krak de Chevalier, Latakia, and Aleppo. Good night from the Old Town.

I think anyone who has been to Jordan will agree that you need to be at least a little bit crazy to drive here. Fortunately, I qualify.  It was my last few days in Jordan so why not…

I rented a car for 3 days to see some of the sites that are difficult to reach using public transport. The result?  dipping feet in one international border (Jordan River with Israel/Palestine), 2 fun traveling companions, 920km, two beautiful nature reserves, 15 hitchhikers picked up, 5 castles, and only one warning from the speed control police.

Wadi Mujib and Wadi Dana Nature Reserves (more on these in another post)

Audrey and Muriel and I scrunched into the petite Kia Picanta (1100cc)

Dipping feet in the Jordan river (5m wide) literally spitting distance from Israel.

al-Azraq, al-Kharana, al-Amra, and Umm al-Jimr all out in the middle of some serious nowhere desert.