(Re)birth of a cocktail

It was probably one of the last summer weekends of the year - and one of the few where all my friends, and some guests, were in town - so we took advantage with a Sunday afternoon in Karen, the posh suburb south of Nairobi named for the Danish writer Karen Blixen. (She was the one played by Meryl Streep in "Out of Africa.") Karen is a lush playground for wealthy Kenyans, many of them descendants of the British settlers who came here about 100 years ago. As a result the place is known as cowboy country, as in "Kenyan cowboy" or "KC" for short, for the freewheeling outdoors lifestyle of the stereotypical White Kenyan.

The rest of us like the town for its great restaurants and gardens - the perfect setting for Sunday lunch. We opted for Talisman, which for my money is the most beautiful restaurant in Nairobi - a single-story house with the back torn off to reveal a huge garden. The dining area is inside-and-out, so you can sit under the sun on Afro-casual teak or under the roof on benches and cushions that are kind of Persian. It's just a really cool place. Inevitably you'll see some minor Kenyan celebrity, and Sunday was no exception - at the table next to us was seated the girlfriend of Tom Cholmondeley, a descendant of the famous Delamere family of settlers, who's currently on trial for the murder of a black stonemason on his massive ranch.

After Talisman's requisite fresh tangerine juice and awesome feta-and-coriander samosas (recently praised in the New York Times) we moved on to a friend's house for some drinks on the patio. That eventually gave way to a ritual viewing of "The Big Lebowski," which, to do just right, requires that you consume multiple White Russians (no sasparilla in Nairobi).

We had to make some local modifications - Kenya Gold coffee liqueur instead of ridiculously expensive imported Kahlua, locally distilled vodka sold under the Smirnoff name, and to top it off, off-the-shelf (as in non-refrigerated) milk, the kind favored by those without reliable electricity. (Powdered milk might have been more appropriate, but whatever.)

The drink would have made the Dude proud. It was so good, in fact, that we think it ought to be a fixture in Nairobi bars. Inspired by the afternoon in Karen, or the intoxicating combination of vodka and milk, we named our cocktail the White Kenyan, and eventually the KC. Look for it in soon in your favorite Nairobi watering hole.

Still reliving the Mog

It was a great weekend in Nairobi, where we're still enjoying summer weather despite the looming long rains of April. Saturday night we had dinner al fresco at Azalea, a continental restaurant that, true to its name, has a beautiful garden patio - but a weird Mexican motif, including a white stucco entryway that reminded me of a Taco Bell. The seared tuna was good, but man what I wouldn't do for a decent taco.

Last night we barbecued at the home of a correspondent for one of the British papers. It took the fire a while to get going, a fact that I blame on inferior charcoal and not my rusty grilling skills. (And why was I made in charge of the grill? Leave it to a Brit to host a barbecue without knowing how to light one.) Finally someone arrived with a plastic soda bottle filled with kerosene, and we were on our way.

I found myself answering a lot of questions about my recent trip to Mogadishu. With all the news about insurgents firing rockets at the airport, wasn't it, as someone put it last night, "pretty stupid" to fly into that city on a commercial plane? What I said, and failed to mention in the post, was that my plane was special.

It was loaded with Kenyan-grown khat - a green plant that, when chewed, acts as a mild narcotic. Khat is king in the Muslim nations of the Horn of Africa, where men spend an inordinate amount of their time and money on the habit, but most of those countries don't grow it. The best khat, so they say, comes from the highlands of Kenya and Ethiopia and arrives by the ton several times a week on commercial planes. It's a way of life, and a big business; part of the reason why so many Somalis grew annoyed with the Islamic courts leadership last year was that they banned the trade in khat for religious reasons. Now the clerics are gone and the khat is back. And there was no way that any good Somali was going to shoot down my plane loaded with the good stuff.

It got us to talking about our worst flight experiences in Africa. There was the Russian guy who sat next to me on the Mogadishu flight, which was operated by Daallo Airlines, which leases old ex-Soviet jets - and even older ex-Soviet pilots. The guy was wearing a blue jumpsuit unbuttoned to his abdomen and clutching a screwdriver, and when the plane landed at one of the many stops we made along the route, he'd jump out onto the tarmac (or dirt, as the case may be) and start tightening stuff with the screwdriver. It made me shudder.

So did talking to one of the stewardesses, who said she grew up in Siberia and joined the airline industry so she could see the world. I don't know much about Siberia, but that seemed like a bad decision.

'Safari has died'

Today I called my carpenter to check on the shelves he told me would be ready last month. An unfamiliar voice answered the phone. "Is Safari there?" I asked. The reply was muffled. It sounded like he said, "Safari has lied."

Then he said, more clearly: "This is his brother. Safari has passed away."

I'd spoken to Safari on Monday. This had become a weekly or biweekly ritual since I met him in October and contracted him to build me a coffee table. I'd call and he'd answer, "Yes, boss!" I'd say how are you and he'd say, "Fine, boss!" I'd ask how the work was coming and he'd say, "Very well, very well." It would take a few more moments to establish that while the work might indeed have been going very well, it was also going very, very slowly.

In January, after about 10 weeks, Safari finished the table he'd said would be done in two. It was gorgeous - a rich, dark-stained mvule wood, elegantly carved in the Swahili style and inlaid with bone. It was just the sort of coastal Kenyan look I'd had in mind in October when I happened to see his little tin-roofed kiosk at the roadside, with the name "Malindi Furnitures" carefully stenciled at the top, and pulled my car over to wander inside.

I liked the table so much that I sent a picture of it to my parents:



















Similar wood and workmanship would cost two or three times more in the U.S. My mom asked if she could have one shipped to her. I immediately asked Safari to make a set of matching shelves to fill out the room. The last time I saw him, last week, the shelves were about halfway done, with the sanding, staining, carving and bonework left to be done. "You don't work quickly, but I guess it's worth the wait," I said. He beamed. "It will last your lifetime," he said.

Bhargavi was visiting over the weekend and we drove past his shop on Sunday, but it was closed. That was strange, I thought. Sundays are usually busy for him, with lots of foot traffic from the nearby shopping complex. On Monday it took me several tries to reach him by phone, and when he finally picked up he didn't sound the same. "I'm sick, boss," he said. I asked if he was seriously ill, but he said he would be OK after a few days.

Safari's brother said it was chicken pox that killed him. Put aside for a moment the insanity that something like that can kill a strong, middle-aged guy, because as I've come to realize, people in Kenya die every day from afflictions we think of as routine. His brother said the family was preparing to take his body to be buried in Malindi with his ancestors, and asked if I could help with the arrangements. I'm traveling out of the country this weekend, I said, but I could help out when I returned.

"And don't worry," he said. "I know you have paid some money. We will organize to have all your work completed in the next few weeks." I started to offer some platitudes about the work not being important, but I stopped. I want those shelves even more now, and I know this sounds maudlin, but I think Safari would have wanted that too.

Dangerous workout

Power cuts are something you live with in Nairobi, as in much of the developing world. People in Uganda and even South Africa deal with it just as often as we do, and in Liberia they don't even have electricity. So I try not to complain too much when the power goes out. I don't have a generator, but in most cuts usually it takes less than 10 minutes for electricity to be restored (although I can remember one case last year when it went out at 6 p.m. and by 9 p.m. was still out, so a bunch of people in my neighborhood went out drinking because, hey, bars have generators).

Naturally, however, there are less opportune times than others for the power to go out. It's bad when you're in the shower and suddenly you find the water heater's stopped heating. It's annoying when you've got Sunday morning eggs on the stove, and suddenly they stop scrambling. Then there are all those times when I've been pumping away at work, and then the Internet is gone.

But today was nearly the worst. I was running on the treadmill at the gym when the entire shopping complex lost power. Rather than merely slowing down as a treadmill does when you hit the "Stop" button, the belt went from a good 11 km/hr pace to zero in a split-second. Porsches don't brake this well. I ran right into the console and was stabbed in the gut. And these were brand-new machines.

Don't they have a mechanism to keep them from stopping on a dime like that? I figure even when you yank that red emergency cord, it just takes you down to a trot. It's probably not something that the manufacturer - whose address was listed as Orlando, Fla. - normally has to think about. But it'll be a few days before I'm able to get back on one of those things.

The Africa reality tour

I'll admit that I've done this: needing an anecdote to illustrate a story about poverty or deprivation in Africa, I've driven to a slum neighborhood in Nairobi to interview "real people." The stories are often really compelling (one of my favorite places is the Ayani primary school, where the kids sing a hilarious song called "These are my private parts...and nobody should be seeing them"). And some people become friends who still send me texts months afterward.

But when you drop in and drop out like that, sometimes it can feel a bit like disaster tourism. A few visitors have asked me to take them to visit Kibera, the biggest slum in East Africa, with probably 1 million people. (If you saw "The Constant Gardener," that was Kibera at its most hectic/beautiful.) Recently the new U.N. Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon, toured the place before issuing some pronouncements on the need to promote African development. Chris Rock was also there some weeks back. Kibera is quickly becoming an obligatory stop on the Kenya tour, right after the safari parks and the house where they filmed "Out of Africa."

Now comes a nice story from Reuters bureau chief Andy Cawthorne about Kibera's growing cachet. I couldn't have said it better:

Any journalist wanting a quick Africa poverty story can find it there in half an hour. And now at least one travel agency offers tours round Kenya's Kibera slum, one of Africa's largest.

"People are getting tired of the Maasai Mara and wildlife. No one is enlightening us about other issues. So I've come up with a new thing -- slum tours," enthused James Asudi, general manager of Kenyan-based Victoria Safaris.

James sounds like a particularly enterprising guy. But the Nairobi intelligentsia is up in arms. The entire story is here.

Don't be alarmed

Some of you are likely to pick up Saturday's New York Times, where you'll see an article by my friend Jeffrey Gettleman about the recent spate of murders in Nairobi. Last weekend two women -- a missionary and her daughter -- riding in a U.S. Embassy car were killed in a carjacking in broad daylight. The same weekend, the top regional official for the charity group CARE USA was murdered in a nighttime carjacking.

The shrugs and gallows humor about "Nai-robbery" aside, the news from last weekend shook the hardened community of Nairobi expats. As Gettleman points out, "something seems to be in the air. Either there is more crime or more publicity about it, perhaps because many of the recent victims have been diplomats." He mentions the best known case, of the American defense attache who was shot by carjackers last fall outside his home not far from the U.S. embassy.

Something is in the air, indeed. Today's Washington Post carries a story by Craig Timberg about the recent crime wave in South Africa, which counts some leading entertainers and other well known figures among its victims. South Africa might be the most crime-ridden country in Africa - certainly the most violently so - Bhargavi and I agree that we both feel safer in Nairobi at night than we do in Johannesburg at dusk. Increasingly, Timberg reports, the the feeling of being at risk of violent crime in SA straddles color lines - both blacks and whites feel like they could be next.

My gut reaction to all this (after the feeling of relief that my parents live in L.A. and don't read either the Times or the Post, or this blog) is that it's worth noting that both these stories were written from the two biggest media, business and humanitarian-aid hubs in Africa. There are other dangerous cities in Africa, to be sure - I've heard you walk alone at night in Dar es Salaam at your peril - but Nairobi, Johannesburg and Cape Town are famously so.

There is tremendous inequality in these cities between the elite/expat community and the 90-plus percent who we as journalists, aid workers, advocates and others are there ostensibly to help. And so we should be saddened, and chastened in our own actions - but we should not be surprised. The elites probably aren't targeted for their skin color or their countries of origin; the U.S. Embassy in Kenya, as well as Kenyan police, were quick to point out that they didn't consider the attack on the women an act of terrorism. But they - or should I say we - are targets because of what we are not, which is part of the vast suffering majority.

The Embassy put out a "warden message" to all Americans in Kenya that urged us to be vigilant and, in the case of a carjacking, to comply with our attackers. It also said that the four people who attacked the missionary and her daughter were riding in an SUV that had been stolen in an earlier carjacking. Driving to a carjacking in your carjacked car - that's either the height of brazenness, or stupidity, or desperation, or maybe all of the above.

Poster boys

By now you've probably seen this poster in some newspaper or on a TV news broadcast somewhere (this picture is from nytimes.com). It depicts Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah - three men who President Bush has not invited to Thanksgiving dinner.

When I was in Damascus in July, this poster was for sale in roughly a million store windows, and during the war in Lebanon it came to symbolize the unity of the Arab world against the U.S.-Israeli alliance.

I took home one of these posters as a gift from a colleague I worked with in Lebanon. It had been sitting under a pile of junk in my office for months, and this week I finally had it properly mounted - politics aside, I think it's a great souvenir. I picked it up today from an art shop, and there was an American (or maybe Canadian) couple there looking at paintings of Maasai warriors.

I had my back to them as I collected the poster, but suddenly I could tell they weren't looking at Maasai anymore. I heard one whispering to the other.

"Where did you get that?" the woman asked me.

"Uh, from a friend," I said. "In Lebanon."

"Oh." Pause. "Where are you from?"

"Uh, California."

"Oh." Longer pause. The man looked concerned. The woman looked slightly disgusted.

I didn't feel like getting into a discussion with these vacationing strangers about irony. I kind of smiled at them, got my change and left the shop. After some thought I elected not to bring it to my office in town, and instead I've put it next to my desk at home, where very few people will probably see it. Probably better that way. I still think it's a great souvenir.

Yes, I'm strapped. Don't worry about it.

An unsettling number of buildings in downtown Nairobi employ guards with metal-detecting wands who give you the once-over before you can enter. (I know that's supposed to make me feel safer inside the building, but as Chris Rock said, "what about all those [individuals] waiting outside with guns? They know you ain't got one.")

 

More unsettling is the fact that most of these guards don't really seem to understand the purpose of the metal detector. Every time I walk into the Barclays Plaza building next to my office, I get wanded, and it always goes off. The first time this happened, I went to take my keys and cell phone out of my pockets, but the guard had already moved on to the guy behind me. He didn't seem to care that I might be carrying. Soon I got the routine - walk up, get the wand, listen for two loud beeps to ensure the batteries are working, then proceed inside with your semiautomatic weapon.

 

I doubt anyone is going to go postal inside the Barclays Plaza building - although it's one of the busiest commercial blocks in town and houses a major Kenya Airways office, so perhaps I shouldn't be so sure. But as I went through the metal-detector charade for the hundredth time this afternoon, it reminded me of the warning issued last week by the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi of "extremist elements" targeting public places in Kenya and Ethiopia. (This was supposed to have something to do with new threats from the Islamic hardliners now running Somalia, but a lot of Somalia-watchers in Kenya didn't give it a lot of credence - some thought it was a bit of fear-mongering to "radicalize" the Islamists.)

 

Whatever the impetus for the warning, there are days when it's easy to remember that downtown Nairobi was the site of a terrorist attack on the U.S. Embassy only a few short years ago. Despite the presence of known radicals inside the country, porous borders and the bad neighborhood Kenya lives in, the government hasn't done anything to convince its residents or the outside world that it's serious about extremist violence.

 

Seeing this takes just one trip to the domestic airport, where planes and passengers come and go with seemingly no oversight. Last month, when I flew back from a trip to the Somalia border, I wore a purposeful look and marched from the airplane to my waiting taxi in two minutes flat.

 

It's easy enough to feel secure in this country if you're a rich person living behind high walls and electric fences with 24-hour armed guards. But if you pay even a little attention, that feeling doesn't extend very far.

Going postal

Due to a billing dispute, the people at the Kenya postal authority have revoked the mailbox that our Nairobi office has used for several years, dating back to my predecessor. (There's no door-to-door mail delivery in Kenya; everything goes to post-office boxes. Side note: One thing I miss about America is the satisfying daily creak of the mailbox being opened by the mailman, or the thwack of a fat magazine sliding through the mail slot. Side note No. 2: Isn't that a very Depression-survivor grandpa thing to say for a 27-year-old? Perhaps.)

Anyway, the postal authority took away our mailbox and reassigned it to another company because they said we didn't pay our yearly bill. This turned out to have been true, only because they never sent us our yearly bill. (I'd say it got lost in the mail, but this situation is even less funny than that joke.) When we told them this, the postal people, to their credit, acknowledged their error. So we don't have a billing dispute per se - what we have is my bank statements, cell phone bills and TV guides going to someone else's mailbox, not to mention our new business cards that just arrived from Washington now list an incorrect address.

The postal people spoke with the new owner of our mailbox, who said he couldn't switch because he'd already printed up office stationary at a cost of about $1,000. This figure seems unlikely unless each letterhead was hand-stenciled by President Kibaki, but I digress. The bottom line is we aren't getting our mailbox back.

Tuesday is a national holiday here, but on Wednesday, office manager Eric is going back to the post office to demand some form of compensation. In the meantime, the postal people have promised to forward our mail to our new mailbox, and if you believe that's going to happen with anything approaching reliability, then I've got some stationary to sell you.

Medical advice

I just had the following IM exchange with a journalist friend who, like me, has a birthday coming up. We were born about a week apart. I was pointing out that this year, his birthday falls the day after an important meeting about a job opportunity:

Shashank: could be an early bday present to you, either way
P: yeah. You're up first next month old man
Shashank: 27
P: 27
Shashank: is that officially "late 20s"?
P: too close to 30
yeah
26 is late twenties
S: 26 is mid
come on now
don't shatter my belief system
P: 5 is mid, 6 is late, 7 is oh my God why did I drink so much?
Shashank: when do i need to start worrying about my prostate?
P: immediately

The war's over

The Israeli-Hezbollah ceasefire took effect Monday, Lebanese troops deployed to the south on Wednesday and displaced Lebanese returned to their homes in droves all week. But in my mind the five-week war wasn't officially over until Friday morning, when the Starbucks and Body Shop stores in Beirut's Hamra district reopened. They were the last of the chain stores to reopen in one of Beirut's major commercial districts.

It seemed the right day for me to leave Lebanon. Two colleagues are staying, so we'll have people in place in case the ceasefire doesn't hold - and people in Beirut are betting that it won't. Since Monday, I've been asking people whether they're relieved that the fighting is over. Almost uniformly, the response is that they're happy for a reprieve from the destruction and uncertainty, but they know it's only temporary. Neither Israel nor Hezbollah came close to accomplishing their goals during the nasty, short conflict. So the feeling is that it's just a matter of months or weeks before things flare up again, and it shows on the faces of people throughout the city.

It's painful to see, because - as I've been telling everyone who asks about our safety, comfort, etc. - Beirut is an amazing city. You rarely see in one city such a vibrant mixture of history, cultural diversity, natural beauty and flat-out bacchanalian excess. As a Lebanese guy I knew in Cambridge wrote in an e-mail: "Lebanese have their own way of dealing with stress and bad days, and that is with partying." It shows in the attention to detail: There are multi-story clubs designed by world-class architects and bars with massive pieces of plane fuselage adorning the interior.

We had dinner with a few other journalists on Friday, my last night, at a great restaurant called Abdel Wahab, which serves traditional Lebanese fare on a beautiful terrace overlooking the Ashrafieh district, with its old, narrow streets and shiny new bars and restaurants. Over mezze and good Lebanese wine we traded stories of our favorite war souvenirs (morbid, but true) - who'd been able to snag the Israeli leaflet featuring Hassan Nasrallah as a snake, or the poster of Nasrallah and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad smiling next to each other, or (jackpot) a Hezbollah flag.

We also talked about Hezbollah's political coup of the day - covered extensively on CNN - of handing out $12,000 lump-sum payments to people who'd lost their homes in the war Hezbollah triggered. It was a bold move, financed by Iran in crisp American $100 bills, but with Hezbollah written all over it. This group takes care of its own. In the days since the ceasefire took hold, they've cemented their support among Lebanon's Shiite community and further angered those who think Hezbollah usurps the power of the Lebanese government.

During the war, you didn't often hear people speak ill of Hezbollah, because they were fighting the Israeli enemy, and even the Sunnis and Christians who despise the group for its militancy said, at least in public, that they hoped Hezbollah would deal Israel a blow. Now that the war is over and its cost is becoming clear, you hear some of those same people wishing that Israel had finished Hezbollah off, i.e., assassinated Nasrallah, who's becoming a legendary figure in the region. The country seems, to many, more polarized now than at the beginning of the war, which doesn't bode well at all.

It was a tragic and incredibly interesting time to be here, and part of me will miss the place, the people and the chance to work on such a big and important story. But it's time to get back to Africa, after nearly five weeks away. While I was gone, Darfur got worse, Congo had its first free elections since 1960 and Somalia continued teetering toward civil war - I have some catching up to do.

A fragile truce

The ceasefire in Lebanon has been in effect for about seven hours, and so far so good. News reports from both sides of the border say - in the overwrought militaryspeak that journalists tend to trot out in wartime - the guns have gone quiet. The Hamra district of Beirut where I've been staying for much of the past three weeks is more vibrant today - there are more people on the streets, more cars, more conversations, more life. The contrast is palpable. It's still early, and plenty of things can go wrong, but it's clear that people are hopeful that the truce will hold.

 

I've obviously waited far too long to post. My only excuse is that it's been terribly busy here, with lots of long hours and late nights and days running together. The war is now in its fifth week and today is my 29th consecutive day of work, starting from the day I traveled to the Middle East from Nairobi.

 

But there are other ways I know I've been here a long time. I've tried nearly everything on the room service menu - the best thing, surprisingly, is a Mexican salad - and I've had to go shopping to replenish notebooks and razorblades. I have favorite coffee shops and favorite restaurants. I've made friends and I've appeared on at least one local blog. In many ways, I now feel like I live here and not in Nairobi, where over the last 12 weeks I've spent about two.

 

Part of this feeling is a product of the Lebanese people, who have almost uniformly been warm and welcoming. The brief looks of disappointment that flash on their faces when they realize I don't speak Arabic quickly disappear - and they don't even return when I tell them I'm American. Many people here feel profoundly betrayed by the Bush administration's almost unquestioning support for Israel in this war. Caricatures of Condi Rice looking like the devil-woman or carrying a purseful of missiles are plastered all over town. But the Lebanese tend not to share those feelings with you unless you ask.

 

I can't say the same for Yatin, who had to cut his vacation in Africa short because I'm still here covering the war and don't know when I'll be back home. In his most recent blog post, Yatin, who I have to say is becoming quite the little writer, described me as "an ass-kissing glory hog who can only say no to his girlfriend and his friends, but not his boss." For the record, I prefer the term "brown-nosing," for obvious reasons. (I was somewhat relieved to read on Seth's blog that he, too, has had to leave visiting friends in the dust because of a news story - see, it's not just me.)

 

I've now been in Lebanon for 2 1/2 weeks. I spent four days last week in southern Lebanon, but due to the travel restrictions I've spent most of the time in Beirut. Despite the massive damage to the southern suburbs and the exodus of thousands of people to safety either overseas or in the mountains to the north, which I think has given people in the West the impression that Beirut is crumbling, most of the city is functioning normally. 

 

The south of the country is a different story. In Tyre, the base for journalists covering the region, electricity last week was spotty and most of the city was deserted. Driving anywhere outside the city is risky, so most cars have the giant letters "TV" taped all over them in the hopes of convincing Israeli jets not to use them for target practice. (Naturally, it didn't take long for Lebanese to start using this tactic on their cars too.)

 

In our trip along the border, we did the same, but we had bigger problems - our car actually broke down. I mean completely crapped out. The radiator busted and scalding hot water gushed into the front passenger seat and directly onto my foot, giving me a first-degree burn. Then the car stopped moving altogether and the strong smell of smoke emanated from the engine.

 

I suppose it could have been worse. Where we broke down was right in front of the U.N. base, which is probably the safest place you can be if you have to be stuck on the border. Naturally, the U.N., which had a mechanic on staff inside the base, said it couldn't help us (no further comment on that, but the word "metaphor" comes to mind). There were about five families still living in the town, and fortunately we found a 15-year-old in flip-flops who got under the car and tweaked something well enough that we could get moving again. So yeah - I love the Lebanese.

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.

On the road in Damascus

I've been in Syria for the past several days covering this side of the conflict in Lebanon (Syria is one of the key backers of Hezbollah and one of the Bush administration's least favorite regimes, plus it's hosting more than 150,000 Lebanese refugees). Damascus, the capital, is the world's oldest continuously inhabited city, although for the first few days here I didn't see that much of it. The story in Lebanon was moving fast and my work days were long.

Language has been a bit of a struggle for me. I don't speak Arabic, but I guess to Syrians I look like I should. People have tended to get 3-4 sentences deep into a conversation with me before realizing that I have no idea what they're saying.

Fortunately, I've had the help of translators for nearly all my interviews. On my first day here I arranged a trip to the Lebanese border to meet refugees fleeing the Israeli attacks. At the appointed time, the translator called my hotel room to say he was in the lobby, wearing a green sweater. I went downstairs and looked around for several minutes, but found no one wearing a green sweater (or any sweater, really, as it was nearly 100 degrees outside). Finally I approached a guy in a green t-shirt; it was him.

Hmm. Sweater, t-shirt? It was kind of a basic mistake for a translator, but I shrugged it off. We went outside to wait for the car. He asked me how I was enjoying Syria. I said I'd only been here about 12 hours, but everyone in the hotel was really nice. "Well," he said, "Syrians are known for their hostility."

Hmm. What was I more worried about? That my well-paid translator didn't know the difference between "hostility" and "hospitality" - or that he did?

Actually, the people here have been very cool. Not that many Americans come to Syria - getting a visa is very difficult - so I've had the feeling of being someplace cut off in many ways from the western world. You can't assume that anyone - shopkeepers, government officials, hotel staff - speaks English, and I'm told that until a year or two ago even Coke was exotic. It's also illegal to convert Syrian pounds into foreign currency, for whatever reason.

Damascus seems to be changing fast, although the Old City is still a trip back into another era - labrynthine streets, centuries-old mosques, throngs of people in covered markets, shops selling everything you can think of. There are also amazing cafes, nargileh bars and even boutique hotels tucked behind unassuming stone doors. Some pictures are below.

Now - although I was scooped by Yat - I'm off to Beirut to join our team covering the conflict. My long-awaited Kilimanjaro climb is off (I was going to hold Yat and Peter up anyway) but my colleagues in Israel and Lebanon have also had vacations and trips home cancelled for this story, so I can't complain too much. It's the nature of the job. Who knows how long I'll be there; the one thing that seems certain is that this thing shows no signs of ending quickly, or smoothly.

Damascus' old city

A market in the Old City

Courtyard of the Omayyad Mosque, a stunning mix of Christian and Muslim architecture

Some of the rooms in the mosque have a very specific purpose

A family leaves the mosque following afternoon prayers

'New' Damascus - the view from my hotel room