The Bei Area

Full disclosure: I can't take credit for "Bei Area" - that brilliance comes from my brother Preetesh, aka Pree Diddy, better known to readers of the comments section of the blog as Baby Bengali.

The road from Damascus to Beirut - once a pretty much straight shot past the nominal border, over mountains and down a steep decline to the modern skyline of the city with the deep blue ocean beyond - is no longer passable. Just past the border checkpoint the road is closed and you can see a massive bomb crater left by the Israeli military. So to travel to Beirut now you take a pretty long detour to the north, through the Bekaa Valley, up into the mountains, through winding, scenic roads and past a series of posh but deserted hill towns, then down to the city. The original road took maybe 2 hours and the detour takes less than 3 - a much longer route made bearable by the scenery and the fact that there are almost no other cars on the road.

I left with a driver at about 7 a.m. Friday in a sturdy if dusty Crown Vic, and once we passed the border into Lebanon he started to point out the sights. First there was the crater in the road. Then there was a succession of bombed out buses and passenger cars, struck by the Israelis, now simply charred husks of twisted metal on the side of the road. There was little traffic in the Bekaa. The IDF has clearly targeted trucks delivering vegetables and other staples to make life as difficult as possible, but we saw a lot of passenger cars that had been bombed too - a fact that made my Syrian driver, who makes the journey several times a week, noticeably angry. (It wasn't until later, when I reached Beirut, that I heard that the IDF had heavily bombed Bekaa overnight. I would have been much more nervous.)

In some of the towns there were a few people sitting outside their homes, some shops opening, some children playing. But generally it felt like early in the morning of a holiday - everyone sleeping late, activity at a minimum. The vistas from some of the hill towns to the green valleys and towns below were stunning - and we passed a number of unfinished hilltop homes belonging, my driver explained, to Lebanon's postwar nouveau riche. Who knows when they'll return to finish those homes.

When we finally reached Beirut itself, life seemed pretty normal in the city center and in the commercial district of Hamra, where I'm staying. People were out shopping, cars clogged the road, the Radio Shack was open so I could get myself an electrical adapter. Look closely, however, and you see that a lot of shops are closed. The Starbucks outlet on Hamra Street has been shut since the fighting began (now 17 days ago) but fortunately there's no shortage of good coffee in the neighborhood.

After setting up shop in the hotel - there was a Time Out Beirut in my room, which I thought was cool, if optimistic - I went down to the city center for the Lebanese government's daily press briefing. Downtown Beirut looked like downtown L.A. on a Sunday afternoon - no one around, huge high-rises looking absolutely deserted, the few cars around driving at breakneck speed. The briefing was uneventful and there were only three other foreign journalists there - perhaps because it had been pushed back from its regular time due to an official visit by an EU delegation.

I went back to my hotel, conferred by e-mail with our colleagues in the region (two in Israel, one in southern Lebanon, one traveling with Secretary Rice in Malaysia, plus our editors in Washington), and we decided I should write the daily news story wrapping up the events of the day. The others were all working on separate stories, and "anchoring the daily" is a necessary but time-consuming job that's best given to someone who has nothing else going that day. It was after 1 a.m. when I finally fell asleep, with "Meet the Fockers" playing on TV.

Today I called Nairobi, where my friends Peter and Yat, visiting from Honolulu and L.A., were on their way to a game reserve in Lake Naivasha. It was a trip I was supposed to have been on, along with next week's trip to Kilimanjaro, and I'm still really disappointed to be missing all of that. Plus I feel pretty terrible that two close friends have flown halfway around the world to visit me in Africa and work has called me away for an indefinite amount of time. (There's also the little matter of a precious bottle of Scotch that Yat imported from Scotland that isn't going to be there when I get back.) But that's the reality of this job, I guess. This is still the biggest story in the world at the moment, it's not going to be over anytime soon, and we have a lot of work to do.