Trablous (Tripoli)

Go to Trablous. Ignore your Maronite friends who mutter about extremism and poor Muslim hygiene, pack wine and water and modest clothing and hop skip hop two hours north up the coast. One minibus is crowned with a cargo of white ostrich plume dusters, another has a white poodle leaning out of the window, curly face turned hopefully into the wind. This is the way to Lebanon’s second city. It is a stone’s throw from Syria and a world away, as if the checkpoints with their red and white barriers and indolent gun-swinging soldiers and painted cedar tree flags looking like they were applied to the empty oil drums by a drunk five-year-old were somehow guardians of a parallel world, the one you thought you were going to meet before you met Beyrouth. Snoozing northwards, they felt the office and the Saturday morning in the studio recording stilted dialogues for early learners drop away under the tyres. With a flourish, the traveller’s wind whipped and buffeted their smiles up to broad – the wind that brings the smile that belongs to the moment you go further than you ever have before up this road, or that.

Ten lost minutes in Trablous and James turned and said “It’s like a balm for the soul”. He was right. It was everywhere, in the cluttered multicoloured streets and the low-rise buildings and the carts of fruit on every corner. Most of all, it was in the smiles and the old men getting up to walk you to the next corner to show you the way and the ahlan wa sahlan and the marhaba and the choukran where “welcome” and “bonjour” and “merci” will do further south, in the openness that held nothing but the gift of helping strangers and the joy of showing the city. This was new, yet remembered, from travels past and dreamed of – the days of being filled up to overflowing by scents and sounds and colours and a people wonderfully different from those you left behind. This was why we came.

In Trablous, everything has a pattern. No more cosmic than anywhere else, but where it matters – at the edges of roofs, in curlicued window bars, along the tops of walls, cushions on stools, around the corners of things, over and under and where they aren’t intended – piles of fruit, fifty upended ceramic toilet bowls on a stall top pink and blue against the sky, embroidered robes and faces scarred and lined. Bolts of cloth, swathes of sheepskin, fish in a tank with a guardian cat beneath, glistening sheep heads on a platter. Nargileh pipes, robes, towering columns of bars of soap, bread on boards and barbed wire by tanks. And, always, the baklawa, miraculous trays of honey-soaked pastry sliced and stacked like a gourmand’s fantasy Lego set. Here, they are the best in Lebanon, but buy them and squirrel them away for later, here in the month of Ramadan.

There was a marvellous hotel, its name painted neatly onto a metal door in a hand that knew no English. It had pink cement between the bricks and rooms up twisty staircases, with baklawa and croissants with halloum for breakfast, and a toothless old man who took out a rogue cockroach with his broom, cackling. That evening, they walked to the Corniche down a long avenue that used to be lined with orange trees but where cement blocks and McDonald’s had sprouted in their place. Every few metres a man with a cart was busily juicing carrots and oranges for fast-breaking drinks, leaving the pavements heaped with orange debris and wrung-out shells, and the air sweet and juicy. Clouds of pigeons wheeled overhead, brown and white between the buildings. Patches of cement on the pavement had the Star of David scrawled over them so that passers-by might walk across and insult them with the soles of their shoes.

Along the long wide Corniche they went in search of dinner, with Dutch bicycles whirring past by the palms and boats rocking gently in untidy lines. Nearly sunset in Ramadan and a huge glistening white iftar tent is there on the dock, filled with families and friends and anyone else, gathered for a charitable hand with their fast-breaking. A sweaty moustachioed sailor on a bike descended and marched them in in front of a hundred curious pairs of eyes. They were hustled to places by the long tables, awkward yet delighted, and metal trays were slid in front of them – dates, bread, almond cake, warmly spiced pilau with chicken and peanuts and almonds, an apple, water, sweet and salty labneh. Small children were sent over by their parents to giggle and to say “Welcome to Lebanon!” from behind shy fingers.

She listened to the sailor tell her about his boat trips to Greece atop of two hundred tons of mixed cargo. He checked his watch every minute and wiped sweat out of his eyebrows, as a black-toothed old man opposite stared at his tray with furious longing and a Syrian taxi driver recognised James from his first day in Aleppo. It made as much sense as anything else. Seven o’clock came without ceremony and the iftar was tied up quickly and simply, with bottles of salty yoghurt drink to take with you. They walked away down the Corniche under an impossible vast orange moon, rats scurrying by and the scent of boiling corn on the wind, everywhere stalls in bright white generated light. The sailor went back to his boat to drink beer, taking and leaving his Islam in true Lebanese style. They told this story to their guide the next day, and he grinned and nodded. “In Lebanon, people worship God, and they also worship the Devil”.

Over drinks at a café, George Michael buzzes in from a neighbouring table’s mobile ring tone. “I ain’t never gonna fast again,” muses Alex. “Hungry boy don’t like religion”. They think it is hil-a-ri-ous.

Back in the old town, blue and white washing on lines forms patchworks between walls and windows. Their taxi driver silently motions them towards his boot and draws out three apples apiece – a Ramadan gift. Ahlan wa sahlan and ahlan fik takes them to a circle of plastic chairs in a pool of lamplight – narghile, strong sweet tea, Bedouin coffee from a silver pot hawked around by a small boy, Syrian soap operas on a TV – ahlan. Sit and join us in the yellow light and we will treat you, and smile and nod, because that is our way. Ahlan.

What a piece of work is Trablous! Sunday brought Ali, who bustled up to them around a corner, grinning, with a photocopy of his name in an old Lonely Planet guide in one had and a plastic bag of modesty robes in the other. Let me show you the city, it will be my pleasure. I will take you along humming souq streets to clean white halls, to dreamlike mosques with stone fountains and men dozing over the Qu’ran on carpeted floors, their foreheads worn with praying. There will be achingly beautiful black and white Mamluk stones by luscious glass and metal chandeliers, ancient courtyards behind niqab shops, mosques that were churches and then mosques again, truncated Roman columns whose foundations are many floors below, conquest after conquest each raising the level of the surface with their own architectural vision. I will take you to the citadel, vast and stony and still home to soldiers and tanks, and leave you there, happy to have taken a detour along my morning to show you what I love.

Later, they wandered through and round and about to the courtyards and workshops where they make the soap. The Soap. You can smell it on the air from outside the walls, jasmine and cedar and olive oil and bathtime suds floating past the chimmering canary cages. Soap in squares, in balls, in flowers, in teddy bears, soap modelled into the Qu’ran and, inevitably, into a portrait of Rafik Hariri. Soap in blocks of bright colours and in every other possible combination, in baskets and suitcases and towers and boxes and moulded into giant rosaries hanging from low ceilings in dark shops. In one of them, a woman grabs your arm and rubs in a sample of her wares. “Apples and milk,” she says. “You will smell of it for two days.” In a quiet, shadowy eyrie, dim light and faded paint, a man has been carving soap his whole life. Knife held surely against apron, shavings piling up around him, moustache as marvellous as surely his family founder’s was in 1808. His shy daughters pour oil and turn handles in demonstration. It is all peaceful and scented and calm and good.

One more thing, before you load up with baklawa and memories and a ridiculous but wonderful old silver fob watch for your trophy case. On the corner of the souq, ask a man at an orange juice stand and he will show you to a shop that barely even merits the name; men with snowy beards and snowier robes sitting around by a few stacks of crisps and orange shoeboxes. They nod to the tourists, for they have seen this before. Through a door at the back and down a corridor strewn with bags of lettuce, there is an echoing, damp, peeling, abandoned, impossible domed mystery of Roman baths. The huge, endless rooms are empty and decrepit, but the domes of the ceilings are wonderfully studded with small points of coloured glass that bring light in, pink, green, blue, yellow, that dances in spotlights on musty walls and mouldy floors. It is quiet, and cool, and wondering.

On the way home, there was still time to stop at Jbeil for a swim. My skin smelled of apples and milk and salt, and of a life being lived.