Baghdad duty free

I had a strange, almost bittersweet feeling leaving Baghdad on Tuesday. I'm blaming it on the sand in my lungs. The winds were especially gusty in the morning, and as we proceeded down the airport road, stopping several times for checkpoints and screaming convoys of American military vehicles, the air seemed to get hazier and hazier. It was a sandstorm, though a light one by Iraqi standards.

Kevin, our security adviser, predicted that my flight to Amman, Jordan -- the launching and landing pad of most civilian trips into Iraq -- wouldn't take off on time. "I never think I'm leaving Baghdad until I'm in Amman," Kevin said.

He was right. My flight was delayed more than five hours, which gave me ample time to survey the concourse at Baghdad International Airport. For a start, it was full of people: Iraqi families probably trying to flee the country, employees of the huge military contractors like DynCorp and KBR, journalists, diplomats and smartly dressed Iraqi businessmen. The sandstorm had delayed all flights, so you could barely find a space on the dumpy gray couches that constituted the waiting area.

I killed a few minutes in the duty free, which was better stocked than most duty free shops in Africa. Women in abayas and 20-something American contractors listening to iPods shopped side-by-side for colognes, backpacks and a huge assortment of candy. I noticed that this was the place where unsold 1980s American surfwear came to die. There were BodyGlove t-shirts and boardshorts in every imaginable color, and in another place and time, I might have bought a few.

There was also a drawing for a Harley-Davidson bike. Given that a large proportion of people came to the airport in armored cars -- an airport trip for hire costs $4,500, Kevin told me -- the Harley raffle seemed awfully ambitious. Quite a few people had entered anyway. What the hell -- I filled out a ticket. I'd spent just four weeks in Iraq, so maybe I was still optimistic.

The journey back to Nairobi was a long one. To pass the time, I eavesdropped on a novelistic conversation between two fifty-something DynCorp contractors from the South who alternately swapped Bible worship books and tales of women they'd been with in central Europe (many of them seemed to be Albanian). I inhaled a lot of cigarette smoke in Amman as I studied an Iraqi couple who'd just fled their country and seemed to have trouble convincing the immigration folks to give them a visa.

I slept on the floor of the airport in Dubai and, via GameChannel and IM, followed the end of a disappointing Dodger game with my brother. Finally, after what seemed like three weeks of airplanes and airports, I landed in a drizzly Nairobi and headed home for a few hours, just enough time to unpack and repack a suitcase for another long journey, this time home to the U.S. for a much awaited vacation.

I'm now sitting in Detroit, my sixth airport in my sixth country in less than 72 hours. I just got an email from a friend who hosts a radio show in Kansas City, wanting to interview me next week about my short time in Iraq. I'm sure my family and friends will have questions too. I feel like I haven't processed any of the experience yet, and I don't think I will have by next week or maybe even next month. Right now, that Harley raffle seems like a long, long time ago.

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.

Beautiful Mogadishu

"You got out of Somalia just in time," people keep telling me. It seems they're right. I just came back from a week in Mogadishu, sometimes described as the most dangerous city in the world, and now things have really started to get nasty there. Peacekeeping troops from Uganda have just arrived in the country - the first international military mission in the country since the early 1990s, and the "Black Hawk Down" incident that drove U.S. troops out of Somalia.

Insurgents are attacking the Ugandans daily, and civilians are being killed - 12 people in one attack alone on Wednesday. It's not clear who the insurgents are, except that they're anti-government, although many people in Mogadishu believe they're linked to the recently ousted Islamic courts militias, whose leaders are urging an uprising against "foreign forces" inside the country.

Not that the previous week was completely quiet. Every day in Mogadishu we heard something - gunshots, a mortar blast or rumors of worse. If Somalia could export rumors, it would be a rich country. I was staying in a place called, hopefully, the Peace Hotel. The owner, a young guy named Bashiir, refuses to host government delegations, U.N. officials or other groups that would make him a lot of money, but could also turn the hotel into an insurgent target. So the Peace is relatively safe. When I was there the only other guests were a Canadian journalist and a handful of Somali-Norwegian NGO workers.

The best thing about Mogadishu is the weather, cooled by the ocean breeze and perfect in the evenings. In the 1970s, thanks to the pristine beaches and Italianate architecture, it was one of the most picturesque cities in Africa, and nowadays you can still buy t-shirts that say "Beautiful Mogadishu." Of course, if you're a foreigner, you can really only buy them inside your (heavily guarded) hotel compound.

Anyway, because of the great weather, we spent our evenings on the roof of the Peace, eating fresh fish for dinner and listening to the Somalis tell stories about their country's glorious past - and, more entertainingly, the bumbling new government. Several of the stories revolved around illiterate Cabinet ministers who contradicted communiques from their own ministries - because they couldn't read them.

Occasionally, the laughter would stop when the sound of gunfire rang through the air, which happened at least once a night. Then each of the Somalis would be on the phone with friends to figure out who or what was hit, and within minutes we'd have a pretty reliable report, which in itself provided some measure of security. Like I said, Somalis love to talk, which made it a pretty fantastic place to be a journalist. But there's a lot of rumor and fiction to sort through, and very few methods of getting accurate information other than talking to as many people as possible.

In that spirit, I ventured out of the Peace compound every day to meet people in various parts of the city. Traveling in Mogadishu these days, you need an armed escort, so everywhere we drove, we were trailed by Bashiir's personal security detail - four guys with machine guns riding in an SUV. This was moderately reassuring except for the times that we got stuck in traffic in dicey, government-controlled neighborhoods and the SUV was stuck right along with us.

A few times I went to meet government officials at their hotels. (The government being weak and Mogadishu being unstable, the officials haven't tried to buy homes or put down any roots in town; they live out of shabby VIP rooms in rundown hotels.) We'd get near the hotel and suddenly there would be cars all around us - usually minibuses, sometimes passenger cars ferrying members of government or their flunkies.

These were the moments when I sensed danger - that if the hotel were to be hit, and all government hotels in Mogadishu have been bombed recently, we and our security detail would be stuck in traffic, unable to move.

That fear hit home when I read about Wednesday's attack, which occurred just outside the Global Hotel. I'd spent a couple of afternoons there. On my last day in Mogadishu I had lunch there with one of the guests, the mayor of Mogadishu, Mahamud Hassan Ali, who goes by the nickname (everyone in Somalia has a nickname) is Adde Gabbow. Just the idea of being mayor of Mogadishu is pretty astonishing, a thought that New York Times correspondent Marc Lacey spelled out beautifully in a profile last year.

Adde Gabbow is a pretty interesting guy. For several years, like so many Somali expatriates, he lived in the Minneapolis area, where he ran a janitorial service and built it into one of the largest such companies in the state. But when his boyhood friend, Ali Mohammed Gedi, was named prime minister of the new Somali transitional government, Adde Gabbow was asked to return to serve his home country. His wife refused to go with him. His two adult children remained in university in the U.S., one an undergraduate and the other a Master's candidate. Both will graduate this spring, and Adde Gabbow plans to be there for both ceremonies.

Lunch was a Dr. Atkins nightmare - rice and pasta and three different sugary fruit juices - but I focused on the fish. I asked the mayor what Somalia needed from the international community. "We need a Marshall Plan," he said. "We need the entire social network to be rebuilt. Somalia was destroyed." The U.S., U.K. and other donor countries have ponied up tens of millions of dollars to bolster the government. But its leaders are not doing a great job of showing they're worthy of it. They refuse to negotiate with political opponents, and Somalia being an intensely clan-oriented society, that stubbornness is part of what's fueling the insurgency.

I asked the mayor whether he thought the government needed to be more inclusive. He sort of shrugged and didn't really answer the question. The meal was ending, and now we were getting into the sensitive stuff. After a while I gave up and asked him about his life in the U.S. "Minneapolis is very cold, but a very nice city," he said through an interpreter, and added proudly that his local paper (the formerly McClatchy-owned Minneapolis Star-Tribune) wrote a profile of him when he was named mayor.

It surprised me that he could have spent several years in the Midwest, built such a strong business and raised two successful children and not have gained at least some mastery of English. It spoke to the other talents he must have possessed in abundance, and to rescue his city, or at least keep it together, he needs those talents now more than ever.

Don't call it Zaire

I told Yat that I was traveling to Congo. He IM'd back: "what u covering in congo? genocide or dictatorship?" I hate to be predictable. But actually, the reason for my Congo trip is an election - the runoff from July's historic vote, the first free elections in 46 years. (Of course, Yat wasn't entirely off-base - Congo until 1997 had one of the world's most notorious dictators, Mobutu Sese Seko, he of the leopard-print clothing, and fugitives from the Rwandan genocide are currently hiding in the forests of eastern Congo.)

I'm in Kinshasa, the capital, which has to be one of the most expensive cities on the continent. The U.S. $100 bill seems to be the basic unit of currency - today I sheepishly pulled one out to pay for $3 in newspapers, and the newspaper guy counted out the change in dollars without batting an eye. (I'm reminded, naturally, of the Seinfeld where George tries to change a $100 at a newsstand and the guy forces him to buy like $10 worth of merchandise, including a Penthouse Forum.)

There's a local currency, the franc, but it's been killed by inflation - something like 20 percent in the last three months alone, one banker told me. I went into a supermarket when I got here to stock up on the essentials - water, mostly, but also Diet Coke for late-night writing sessions, should there be any. Instead of pricetags, the store had stuck a code number on every item to correspond to the price - A04 is 1,000 francs, B06 is 3,500, etc. - and posted the key throughout the store. So when the value of the franc drops, they just change the key.

The other thing I've noted here is that people have a great variety of ways of asking for money. It started when I landed at Kinshasa airport, a Danteesque realm of heat and low-level chaos. At the immigration counter - this is literally the first Congolese person I meet - the man stamps my passport and starts to engage me in a conversation. This while dozens of people are gathering behind me in line. He asked how I was, I said fine and you, and he came back with, "It's hot and I could use something to drink." I realized that he'd handed me back my passport already, so I just walked away.

Later that day I had a couple of guards at a government ministry tell me they wanted "quelque chose de sucré" - something sweet. Only I thought they said "quelque chose de secret" - a secret, which didn't make much sense. But lack of comprehension made it easier to say no. It wasn't until five minutes later, when the guy working the elevator asked me the same thing, that I understood. Finally the woman inside the ministry who was taking care of my accreditation offered to do it immediately "si tu t'occupes de moi" - if I took care of her.

The thing is, with the exception of the woman in the ministry, these people weren't asking for bribes. They just wanted money. And they weren't street children or beggars - they had jobs, which in this country actually makes them privileged.

How does it feel?

Man, I am wired today. I'm in Uganda, and my hotel didn't serve regular coffee, only espresso, which I haven't yet figured out how to drink properly - I just drink it like regular coffee, with milk - so I started my day with about 5 shots. As Kaduk's dad might say, I'm flying right now.

 

This coffee thing is really annoying, actually. Uganda, like Kenya, grows great coffee. But very little of it is roasted locally - most of it is shipped off to be processed in Europe, which captures all of the markup, just like in colonial times. So you go to the coffee growing regions of central Kenya and southern Uganda and you're more often than not served Nescafe. I guess you could call me a coffee snob, but I can't drink that crap. (I can't. I won't.) When you're traveling for work and you don't get a good night's sleep because the bed is like concrete and the eggs look like mucus and you're about to do five hours on a road with bathtub-sized potholes, you need some help waking up. I might start packing ground coffee and a french press on my trips. Too poncey? Perhaps. But I'll be awake.

 

I was in northern Uganda over the weekend reporting on the peace process, which after 20 years is finally making some - some - headway. I've been there twice now, and I find it to be the most compelling story I've come across in Africa. It's probably because of the children - 30,000 of them have been abducted by the LRA rebels over the years, and their stories are incredible. The people of the north are unfailingly gentle and welcoming. And the fact that this is now the longest running civil war in Africa lends the place a tragic quality.

 

I actually think northern Uganda is one of the easiest places in Africa to report from. It requires a short flight (50 min. from Nairobi) and a 4-hour drive on a generally decent road to the town of Gulu. (Usually you also stop in the government offices in Kampala to get military permission to travel north - a formality.) Once in Gulu, you are in the thick of the shit. Tens of thousands of victims of the war live in and around Gulu, and they've been suffering so long that they no longer have any qualms discussing it.

 

Some NGO types I was talking with yesterday were saying that this is one of the most underreported crises in the world - and I had to dispute that. Maybe compared to Darfur, which is a special case. But not compared with Congo, which is a far huger crisis in terms of the human toll - 4 million and counting - and certainly not compared with the all-but-unknown crises in places like the Central African Republic (which hardly anyone ever visits, me sadly included).

 

In Gulu I met up with 12-year-old Dennis, the boy I profiled in the spring, an LRA abductee who had lost his family and was living on his own in a shelter. That story generated an incredible response - several readers back home wrote in asking how to adopt him, including the wife of the publisher of one of our papers. Seeing Dennis again was bittersweet, and I'll write more about that later.

 

Last night in Kampala I went with a journalist I know to a big group dinner. One of the people there was the new BBC correspondent in Uganda. BBCers in Africa, especially smaller countries, are often treated as celebrities because of the huge reach of the network and its radio programming - when I tell anyone I'm a journalist, they automatically I assume I'm with the Beeb. (I have never used this to upgrade my hotel room. At least not recently.)

 

Their new Uganda person has a tough act to follow - the previous correspondent, Will Ross, was famously ejected from the country this year for reporting on the president's family (the capstone of several years of excellent work). The correspondent before him was a minor celebrity in town and was written up regularly in the hilarious Red Pepper, Kampala's version of a British tabloid, only more profane. (Last month the Pepper published the names of several alleged homosexuals - read criminals. Human Rights Watch went crazy.)

 

Apparently the Pepper has wasted no time with the new person. She'd not been in town a week before it ran the headline, "BBC Posts Hot Mzungu Babe," (mzungu means white person) above a picture of her looking bored at a press conference. The brief text below went on to explain that she was single and had come here in search of a Ugandan man, and might have used the word "desperate." Nairobi doesn't have a Pepper equivalent, otherwise we'd all be falling over ourselves to get in there.

 

At the end of the night - after the obligatory African discussion at my end of the table of Iraq, Bush, Hillary and the coming of the apocalypse - we wound up at Al's Bar. It was my first time there. Al's is a Kampala institution - it's been around for about 13 years, which is an eternity the way the city's been growing. They play the classics - Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, stuff you don't hear in Africa outside your iPod. Some nights, I was told, you used to be able to see the president's brother, the head of the army, get head-down drunk at the bar. Every night, you see a world-class collection of prostitutes. Last night I saw one playing the drums to Bob Dylan's "How Does it Feel?" on her breasts. And then it was time to go home.

Sweetwaters

Apologies for not posting for a while. No excuses, as I haven't been traveling and things around Nairobi have been pretty quiet. Bhargavi was up here last week from South Africa, although both of us spent the week working. I was finishing up a piece on China's investment in Africa and reporting an update on the Islamists' takeover in Somalia.

B's trip got off to a rough start because she flew Kenya Airways, which means a roughly 50-50 chance that her luggage would be lost. (I know that lost luggage is usually due to the airport ground staff, not an airline, but it's just easier to blame the airline, and I have lots of other grievances with Kenya Airways anyway - a topic for a future post.) Naturally, her bag didn't come, but as there are two flights daily from Johannesburg we figured the it would arrive on the evening flight. They promised to call us after the flight left Joburg to say whether the bag made it aboard, but they didn't. When we called them, we were told they couldn't make outgoing calls. That should give you an idea of the kind of operation we're dealing with.

We headed for the airport anyway, but the bag hadn't arrived. When B complained, the woman at the lost luggage counter tried to scold her for coming despite not receiving a phone call. "Your colleague told me you couldn't make outgoing calls," B said, and that seemed to shut her up.

That night, B had to wear the same clothes she had flown overnight in. Too bad, because I had planned Nairobi's version of a big night out - dinner at Alan Bobbe's Bistro (my new favorite restaurant, and not because it's 100 yards from my house) followed by blackjack at the Intercontinental Hotel casino. Her mood perked up considerably when, between the two of us, we took home $200 at the tables - especially good considering the minimum bet was 200 shillings, or about $3. It was her first time ever at a casino, and I'm afraid I may have created a monster.

This past weekend we drove up to Mount Kenya to a private game reserve called Sweetwaters. This is one of those places where you sleep in "luxury" tents - basically simple hotel rooms under canvas, but the amazing thing about Sweetwaters is that the tents sit at the edge of a waterhole. This might not sound that amazing, but what it means is that you have animals walking up to within a few dozen feet of your tent to drink and bathe. From your tent you could be looking at a herd of zebras, giraffes, or the scene B and I saw one night at dinner - a family of elephants drinking quietly under the moonlight. It was incredible.

The other great thing about Sweetwaters is it's home to a chimpanzee sanctuary. There are a few dozen chimps there, most of them orphans or rescued from captivity in places like Rwanda and Congo. It's also home to perhaps the world's only tame black rhino, Murani, who you can touch and take pictures with and he won't gore out your eyes like other rhinos. Besides that we basically drove around the 22,000-acre sanctuary in my battered LandCruiser, feeling very much like Safari Joe and Jane.

We mostly drove by ourselves, but one time we took a local guide, who was great except for (or perhaps because of) a few quirks of English. He kept pointing out various species of birds that were named buzzards, only he pronounced it more like "bastards." Hence he kept making me slow down to point out a "yellow-bellied bastard" - sounding a bit like a gangster in a black-and-white film.

We returned on Sunday and B took off early Monday. Before she left I hosted my first semi-proper preparty Sunday evening. It was long overdue, as I just hit my one-year mark here. We were eight people, which is just the right amount for a chill happy hour before dinner, especially in my average-sized living room. It was me, Bhargavi, two expat friends of mine, two visiting American photographers and two Kenyan friends of B's from Boston. I had just enough glassware to go around. The mixed group made for a good time, one of those nights where the conversation flows easily from drinks to dinner. I need to do that more often.

Other than that, I'm thinking of redecorating - or actually just decorating - my apartment. Not exactly sure what has brought this on, but I think it's partly that the one-year milestone has made me realize my Nairobi life isn't temporary, and partly that they've just installed wireless Internet in my apartment complex. That was the tipping point. I've often thought that eventually I'd move into a big house with a big garden like most of the other expats here, but that frankly sounds like a lot of work, and what would I do with five bedrooms? I'd have to hire a lot more people to take care of the place, and I can barely manage my own life. So stay tuned for my forays into furniture selection. And for some pictures from Sweetwaters.

View from the Sweetwaters camp

The "campsite" 

A giraffe crosses the road right in front of us - this never seems to get old 

A couple of jackals fight over a gazelle carcass 

One of the coolest things we saw - a pack of lions stalking a kill at night 

The Sweetwaters sancutuary is one of the only places in Africa that you can see chimps outside their native Great Lakes region 

B makes a friend in the chimp sanctuary 

Me and B with Murani, the "tame" black rhino 

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