Riding the Beqaa Valley...

An other beautiful sunny day!

My face and shoulders have already suffered a few sunburns from the past days cycling and my sunglasses have left horrible tan marks on my face: very red nose and cheeks and very white circles around my eyes.
“Pray not to meet the man of your life today!” joked one of the chicas.
Oh he’d better not show up today if he doesn’t want to take to his heels…Even my super-powerful Glam Bronze powder has become helpless!
But then...if he’s really “the man of my life”, shouldn’t he love me just the way I am? With my sunburns, red nose and horrible tan marks?
Girls’ morning talks :-)
My chica pointed at her watch to stop my romantic thinking: we were late (as usual).
“You will have plenty of time to elaborate on the “man of your life” theory while riding through the Beqaa Valley today!”

Lebanon’s major farming region and agricultural source, the Beqaa Valley is famous for its vineyards and some of its wineries’ history goes back as far as 6000 years.

We started the ride from Kab Elias, the 3rd most important city of the Beqaa after Zahlé and Baalbek and a clearly pro-March 14 Alliance town, with blue ribbons (the emblematic colour of the movement) and portraits of former Sunni Prime Minister Rafic El Hariri everywhere.Politics again!

We enjoyed an other yummy home-made breakfast prepared by Kab Elias women, a Dabkeh spectacle performed by children (the population of Kab Elias is very young, 60% are under 25) and…a 150 women-line to get to the bathroom!
One of the local women came to invite me for coffee at her place in a very rudimentary English - which I found so cute! - and when I responded in Arabic and told her that I was an Arab, she hugged me and insisted that I come. “ Haidi ussulna” she said (These are our traditions). I would have gladly accepted if I didn’t have 60 km cycling ahead and after some tough negotiations to decline the invitation, she got me promise her to visit her house whenever I come back to Kab Elias.

I had made so many friends this way during my previous trips to the Middle East and recall particularly this Palestinian family in one of Jerash refugees’ camps in Jordan. I was travelling alone from Amman to Jerash to visit the Roman city ruins and sat by their daughter in the bus. She first thought I was a foreigner and started struggling with the few English words that she knew to hold a decent conversation. I was amused by her efforts and let her practice a few minutes before I switched to Middle Eastern Arabic and told her hat I was from Morocco.
Hospitality is not a random nice Arab tradition. It is a cultural must and every Arab should honour “Abir a’ssabil” (the visitor) and offer him/her meal and shelter, no matter how modest they are. My bus-mate invited me to share their lunch, called up the extended family (her siblings, aunts and cousins) to come over for tea and meet the “Moroccan guest”, and took me with a dozen of her relatives to visit the Roman city.
I first felt a bit embarrassed and though I was originally planning to spend a quite afternoon meditating between Jerash ruins, far from Amman’s hectic and cosmopolitan way of life, I found myself surrounded by a happy noisy little crowd, who had mobilized the whole afternoon to take care of me. So nice to feel like a little princess, be it for a short afternoon :-)

One of the Danish cycling mates who saw the whole negotiation process with the Kab Elias lady smiled to me and said: “In this region, loneliness has no room!”. She was so right.

The Beqaa villages are scattered between olive groves, wheat fields and huge vineyards, and the whole valley is surrounded by snow-capped mountains’ peaks of the Anti-Lebanon mountains range on the one side, and Mount Lebanon’s on the other, giving it a little air of Moroccan Atlas (without Marrakesh’s palm trees though)

Very pleasant ride and lovely sceneries but a bit less fun than yesterday, as most of it was on countryside roads, outside the villages and with no contact with the people (and no fruits/juice or candies’ invitations :-)