Sent to the Middle East

I've been dispatched to the Middle East to help with our coverage of the crisis in Lebanon. This was sudden - I got a call from Washington Sunday night and, thanks to some magic from my travel agent, found myself on a plane to the region the next night, leaving my apartment in the care of Yatin, which seemed only slightly less dangerous than where I was headed.

For the next 24 hours, I felt like I was speed-dating the airports of the Middle East - Nairobi to Dubai (great duty free shopping; bought some shades), Dubai to Cairo (met my Egypt-based colleagues, got a shotgun tour of the city via cab), Cairo to Amman (excellent VIP transfer service by Royal Jordanian ensured I made my 45-minute connection), Amman to Cyprus.

Cyprus - tourism slogan: "The Island for All Seasons," assuming those seasons are "muggy," "stuffy" and "humidifier" - is sort of like Jamaica for European tourists. The town where I've landed, Larnaca, is also a bit of Miami - a long seafront lined with hotels and uber-chic cafes with expansive patios, all apparently vying for a spot in an interior-design magazine while not actually catering to any customers. That's because everyone is on the beach - everyone, including people who look too old to be sunbathing topless. This is not a feature of the American beach vacation. (Naturally, I've camped out inside the Starbucks, since I thought I might be going to a war and didn't pack for the beach.)

Well, in the past week, Cyprus has gone from Eurobreak '06 to ground zero for foreigners fleeing the violence in Lebanon. They expect that more than 10,000 evacuees will pass through this tiny island before it's all over, and combined with the standard holiday rush of tourists, finding a hotel room here is a task for military intelligence. On this, my third night, I'll sleep in my third different hotel - and I got this room after going door-to-door for nearly two hours and finally persuading a woman that I wouldn't take the room until after 9 pm. (It wasn't an act of charity on her part - she's already got a guest paying full price for the afternoon, so she'll rent the room twice today.)

Yesterday was a long, hot day waiting for the first wave of American evacuees to reach here. It was about 2 a.m. before the passengers disembarked, after a seven-hour voyage in the dark, when they were greeted by...a phalanx of journalists from an alphabet soup of wire services and TV networks. Everyone from the U.S. was on severe deadline - it was nearing drop-dead time for stories for papers on the East Coast - so the reporters yelled at the disembarking passengers to come over and chat before boarding buses to the immigration terminal. The big-name-network producers held up notepads with the network's name printed in bold, and several of the passengers came over and obliged our questions.

The result was that about 20 journalists interviewed one passenger at once, so if you read multiple stories about the American evacuation, you'll see the same person quoted multiple times. I couldn't stay and wait for them to be processed through immigration - I had a deadline, so I raced back to my hotel room to file an update to our story. It was 4 a.m. before I was done, and I crashed. I was up at 10 and from there it was a scramble to check out of my hotel, find a new one, secure a plane ticket out of here (another task requiring MacGyveresque skills) and, oh yeah, file an update on the evacuation. It all finally got sorted out late this afternoon, and I'm going to spend the rest of the day looking at the ocean - from inside the air-conditioned Starbucks.

- Read our story on the evacuation
- See pictures